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.

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Evaluating Gameplay in GTA IV

As stated, Grand Theft Auto IV is a DX9 game, it does not support DX10 currently. Grand Theft Auto IV has only scant few graphics options for us to play with. In fact, there are only six, if you don't count the resolution and aspect ratio. Furthermore, GTA IV does not support anti-aliasing (AA) or anisotropic texture filtering (AF). There are no in-game settings for AA and AF, and attempts to force either option from either the NVIDIA Control Panel or ATI Catalyst Control Center do not work. At the moment, it is unclear why these technologies, which have become popular to the point of being ubiquitous, are forsaken on the PC version of GTA IV. PC gamers like a lot of options, and with only six graphics options in-game, AA and AF are basically all that is left. With those two options unavailable from the start, GTA IV begins to be painted a rather unappealing hue for PC gamers.

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Video Mode

The first graphics option is labeled Video Mode, which allows users to select from a pre-defined list of resolutions and refresh rates supported by their video cards and monitors. The second option, Aspect Ratio, allows users to manually specify an aspect ratio, presumably in case the auto-detection mechanism fails. Available options include "Auto", 16:9, 16:10, 4:3, and 5:4. In our experience, the "Auto" option worked every time, so we never needed to change it.

Texture Quality and Render Quality

The Texture Quality option decides the resolution of textures that Grand Theft Auto IV uses to draw the world. Available options are "Low", "Medium", and "High." The Render Quality option determines the quality of shader-based options like water, HDR lighting, and reflection mapping, and includes "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Highest" as options.

View Distance and Vehicle Density

The View Distance slider goes from 1 to 100 and determines the distance at which large objects like cars, buildings, and bridges are drawn or hidden. The second slider, Detail Distance, also goes from 1 to 100. It determines the distance at which details are drawn, such as stairwell rails, window sills, and fire escapes. The Vehicle Density option, which also ranges from 1 to 100, allows the gamer to select how much traffic is rolling around Liberty City's streets. A low setting here can adversely affect gameplay by removing potential getaway vehicles from the landscape. But, if you are CPU-limited, lowering this option may help improve your framerates. The Shadow Density slider ranges from 0 to 16 and allows the gamer to select the number of objects which cast shadows on-screen.

Auto Configure

There is an Auto Configure options which attempts to configure GTA IV based on pre-defined data about your video card and CPU. In practice, these options rarely work as intended, and in GTA IV, it is especially irritating. It annoyingly decides to set whatever resolution it so chooses, regardless of what resolution you have selected and your monitor's native resolution. So if you want to run at a specific resolution, the Auto Configure button is not for you.

Benchmark

Of interest to us is the Benchmark button at the bottom of the list. Selecting this option breaks out of the core GTA IV game and loads up some benchmarking tools. The benchmark itself consists of a short run through a gunfight on motorcycles. Overall, we found the benchmark tool to be a little generous with itself, often generating better performance than what we actually encountered in-game.

Resource Usage

Finally, there is a resource usage indicator. This is a fiddly little piece of work. It shows you roughly how much video memory it thinks it will use with any given graphics setting. The biggest problem is that it won't let you exceed your available resources without some tweaking. The number is affected by the Video Mode, Texture Quality, and View Distance settings. If you just want to run at 1920x1200 with High Texture Quality and reasonably a High View Distance setting, you first have to lower the texture resolution to Medium, set the resolution and View Distance, and then select the Texture Quality option back to High. Doing it any other way resulted in the game limiting the options we were able to select.

This seems like a needless feature to us, artificially limiting what we believed our test system was capable of doing. We understand that Rockstar is probably saving itself some support calls from less savvy gamers setting their options way to high, but to us, it was merely annoying.

The Test

Performance in Grand Theft Auto IV is a mixed bag. There are places where your framerate is just going to drop, regardless of what settings you are using. You just have to be a little forgiving and a little flexible when talking about performance in this game. Obviously, we would all love to have all of our games stay above 30 FPS at all times. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. And with GTA IV, you can count on that never happening. So, during our testing, we were absolutely aiming for 30 frames per second, which we believe is the best place for our red-line to be. The game is playable down to about 25 frames per second, so we're willing to excuse dips below 30 FPS, but for optimal driving conditions, we like it to be around 30 FPS.

So, for our test, we decided to drive around Liberty City. We found that the most graphically challenging areas were on the bridges, between the various sections of city when the most ‘city’ is actually visible. So, we chose a route to exploit that weakness. We started on the far west part of the city at a "bar" called Honkers and drove to our safe-house in Northwood on the Algonquin island. From there, we proceeded southeast to the "Memory Lanes" bowling alley on Firefly Island.

The vehicles we chose are the Banshee (Dodge Viper clone) and the Coquette (Corvette C6 clone). The Banshee has disastrous understeer at speed while braking, so it forced us to drive relatively carefully if we wanted the car to last the first leg of the journey. When we got to our Northwood safe-house, we changed to the Coquette for the rest of the trip. The Coquette is very fast, but does not steer well at any speed, which also forced us to be careful so as not to blow ourselves up before the end of the trip. By the end, the trip takes between 5 and 6 minutes, depending on how much trouble we get ourselves into on the way.