Grand Theft Auto performance issues
If, like me, you experienced issues with rockstar’s latest release of their game Grand Theft Auto IV (if, you haven’t you can get it here from amazon, £24.99), you may have noticed that it probably doesn’t run all that hot on your machine (if it’s not at least dual core). First thing I would normally have done is tweak with the settings a little bit, but you might find that if you can play games like crisis, you would have thought that you’d be able to play GTAIV at a reasonable level of detail. It turns out that perhaps the settings levels allow for just too much detail to be rendered on-screen, making the game perform poorly on less powerful systems. In this case, I would suggest move the sliders all the way to the left (down to 1) and then try the game again.
Unfortunately for me, this didn’t help, so in the end I shelled out and bought:
- new motherboard (gibabyte p35 DS3R – approx £50)
- 2GB memory (crucial 800mhz – approx £22)
- cpu (intel core 2 duo @ 2.6ghz – approx £123)
- power supply (coolermaster 550w – approx £50)
Far cheaper than buying a whole new computer! I didn’t feel the need to change my gfx card (an Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950pro), it seemed to handle everything ok (not great mind you), but the processing power from the new cpu seemed to do the trick. Now the game runs very smoothly indeed, and I’m only running the memory in single channel mode (only 1 stick of memory is in the computer), all I have to do is add a another stick of memory (crucial 800mhz – approx £22) and get another performance boost!