Grand Theft Auto 4 caused a lot of problems on its launch: crashes during startup, the copy protection and the performance annoyed the customers.

By now Rockstar reacted and delivered a http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,670818/News/GTA_4_PC-_Patch_fixes_startup_problems_and_crashes/ which fixes several bugs and also makes it possible to test several graphics cards without complications.

In order to keep the framerate at a moderate level we use maximal details, but restrict the draw distance to 50 percent - a value normally intended for cards with 1,024 MiByte VRAM. As our http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,669595/Reviews/GTA_4_PC-_CPU_benchmark_review_with_13_processors/ reveals, GTA 4 primarily needs a fast CPU.

To check the performance of the graphics cards we use our Promenade benchmark. It challenges the system with many passengers and heavy traffic as well as a huge range of visibility and is quite representative for GTA 4 because you spend a lot of time in the city.

Therefore we use a Quadcore Extreme QX6850 clocked to 3.33 GHz instead of the Core 2 Duo E8500 we usually use. The remaining components are a Intel chipset and 2x 2,048 MiByte DDR2-800 RAM and Windows Vista SP1. More PlayStation 3 News...