Date:
Monday , December 15, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Grand Theft Auto IV Gameplay Performance and IQ

Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC is finally here! It has a steep set of recommended system components, so we're going to take it apart and tell you what you can expect from seven of today’s most current and popular video cards.

Introduction

If we could go back in time to 1997 and tell DMA Designs founder David Jones that his fledgling top-down game Grand Theft Auto would evolve into a series of games costing tens of millions of dollars, and feature voice-acting from A-list Hollywood actors, he may have laughed us out of Scotland and had restraining orders placed against us. But that is precisely what GTA has become. It is such a ubiquitous series, in fact, that virtually any game with a free-roaming "sandbox" environment is almost instantly labeled a GTA clone.

The Game

Grand Theft Auto IV is actually the 11th game of the GTA series, if you count the various console and handheld versions. Initially released on April 29th, 2008 for Xbox360 and PS3, the PC version came a little more than seven months later, on December 2nd, 2008. On its first sales day in April, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies, and in its first week on the shelves, it broke the $500 million mark. However, since its release on the PC, it has encountered fierce criticism both for its inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software, its inclusion and requirement of both the "Rockstar Games Social Club" application and the "Games For Windows - Live" application, and for its apparently beta-quality programming. Rockstar has reported that roughly 1% of its support customers are having technical issues with the game, but admits that internet forum users may be a "more outspoken percentage" of gamers.

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It seems that the GTA series is destined to be in the spotlight for as long as Rockstar cares to continue the franchise. It may be seen by some as little more than a controversy vehicle for Rockstar, but if that is the case, it is also a psychotically fun controversy vehicle. Combining elements of driving games and third-person shooters, GTA IV gives the player nearly complete access to Liberty City, including an unprecedented amount of things to do, including bowling, playing darts, and even the occasional organized street race.

The driving mechanics have been updated with physics support in GTA IV. This has allowed for a much broader range of vehicles to be present in GTA IV compared to earlier games in the series. It has also allowed a much more authentic damage modeling system not only for the cars, but for world objects like light poles, fences, construction barricades, and of course pedestrians. The combat system has been updated with a functional, if rudimentary cover system. The cover system includes sliding to cover, blind-firing, and target locking.

The Technology

Grand Theft Auto IV uses Rockstar's own RAGE game engine. It also incorporates Natural Motion's Euphoria animation engine, Image Metrics for facial animation, and the popular SpeedTree for foliage. Beyond that, it is unclear. For example, we don't know if GTA IV uses middleware for Physics processing, or if an in-house engine is built into the RAGE platform. The RAGE Engine itself was developed by Rockstar in reaction to their previous licensor, Criterion, selling the RenderWare game engine to EA Games and EA's subsequent dissolution of RenderWare as a business. We do know this though, GTA IV is a DX9 game, there is no DX10 support currently.

From a system requirements perspective, GTA IV is pretty average compared to what we've seen from other recent games. As a minimum, Rockstar states that a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo or 2.4GHz AMD Athlon X2 is required, alongside 1.5GB of memory and 16GB of disk space. Video card-wise, Rockstar recommends at least a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 or a 256MB ATI Radeon X1900. Recommended system specifications, however, are a little more beefy. GTA IV wants a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad or a 2.1GHz triple-core AMD Phenom, with 2.5GB of memory (for Windows Vista; 2GB for Windows XP) and 18GB of disk space accompanying a GeForce 8600 GT with 512MB of memory or a Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB of memory.

The Competition

We'll be evaluating Grand Theft Auto IV on seven different video cards today. From NVIDIA, we have a GeForce GTX 280, a GeForce GTX 260 with 216 cores, and a GeForce GTX 260 with 192 cores. From AMD, we have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, a Radeon HD 4870 512MB, a HD 4870 1GB of memory, as finally a Radeon HD 4850.

These seven video cards address the current generation video card market from US $150 up to $450 and should cover most of our readers' concerns about GTA IV on this latest generation of GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA.