GTA 4- CPU or Graphics Card

[UberGenocide]

Im sorry if this is in the wrong thread but i was wondering

Does GTA 4 mainly rely on the CPU clock speed or the Graphic Card and its Memory, or system RAM

What im seeing is that GTA 4 has nice graphics, but nothing like crysis has

I have
Asus P5Q
Pentium Dual core E2200 @ 2.45 GHz(mild overclock i know)
3 GB system ram at 667
MSI 9600 GT OC

i can run crysis warhead at high to very high settings on 1680*1050 with 4 AA at 20-30 FPS(12-17 in jungle)

Please reply with ne thoughts u may have

thanks

 

[Nik_I]

all games short of some RTS's are much more reliant on the gpu rather than the cpu. upgrading to a 4870 or 4890 would significantly improve your performance in games.

 

[jimmysmitty]

^Not to disagree but I have GTA4 and to be honest his CPU is to slow for it.

The games engine was designed with at least 3 cores in mind. When it first came out there was a huge number of people with the best GPUs and dual cores having performance issues. But people with a quad a 512MB (if you have a 1GB GPU it would help too) GPU never had the same probems.

If you can upgrade both. But if not the CPU will help more than the GPU will since its very picky on that.

 

[UberGenocide]

all games short of some RTS's are much more reliant on the gpu rather than the cpu. upgrading to a 4870 or 4890 would significantly improve your performance in games.

(not argueing)

Then why is a recommended requirement a 2.4 quad core??

and there is a Vid on youtube of GTA 4 running on high settings with a 9600 GT

plus im getting the 260 GTX or 275

 

[miocene]

GTA IV is very reliant on cpu power. My E6400 @2.13GHz (no overclock - but a pretty fast cpu for 2 years old) just cannot cope. A quad-core is highly recommended and I'm sure you'll see a huge improvement over the E2200.

GPU is obviously important for nice graphics but good CPU will give you the fps

 

[UberGenocide]

^Not to disagree but I have GTA4 and to be honest his CPU is to slow for it.

The games engine was designed with at least 3 cores in mind. When it first came out there was a huge number of people with the best GPUs and dual cores having performance issues. But people with a quad a 512MB (if you have a 1GB GPU it would help too) GPU never had the same probems.

If you can upgrade both. But if not the CPU will help more than the GPU will since its very picky on that.

so your saying that a Q8400 will perform better on GTA 4 than an E8500??

and what about other games...will a Q8400 suffice for COD4 and Rainbow Six vegas 2 and Crysis warhead??

 

[AKM880]

Yes, since it has more cores to spread the load (Or so I think :lol

 

[UberGenocide]

Yes, since it has more cores to spread the load (Or so I think :lol

i was thinking(and wat ive read) that a higher clock is better for gaming...plus not many games are multithreaded

 

[AKM880]

Well FSX, GTA4, Crysis games like that are already optimized for multi core CPUs.

 

[cpburns]

just throwing this out there:

played this on a dual 2.26GHz intel (P8400) with 4GB DDR2-800 and a GF 9700M GT. it ran awfully.

when i built a system with a 3.0GHz quad amd (P2-940BE) with 8GB DDR2-800 and a GF GTX 260 C216, the game flies now.

it's hard to say which is the bigger upgrade since i boosted both so tremendously. i do know hardocp ran a very interesting article comparing various games' performance numbers on different CPUs while using 2x 4870X2 in CFX (to limit graphics bottlenecking). they compared a couple intel quads to the amd tri-core and quad core. in gta4 in particular, the tri-core was still distinctly below the performance of all the quads.

conversely, the quads all scaled together fairly equally. architecture didn't seem to affect the issue so much as number of cores, and the base speed of the cores. aka, 3.6GHz core i7 vs. 3.6GHz core 2 quad vs. 3.6GHz phenom2 x4 all scaled fairly equally, but a 3.6GHz phenom2 x3 fell behind.

it also didn't seem to be the cpu being inundated trying to fill the cards with data, because gta4 only supports 2x GPUs. so no tri-sli or quad or cfx or whatnot.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTY0NCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

as to something like the Q8400 vs. the E8500, yes, the E8500 would likely be better for the majority of other current titles that are only really capable of dual-threading. ideally, get the best of both worlds: get a quad with a good multiplier on it, and OC it to 3.6GHz+

in the next 5 years, i think it's highly likely we'll start seeing a lot more multi-threading scaling to at least 4 threads if not the 6 of the x360 or 7-8 of the ps3, and eventually N threads. as the 7th gen consoles pick up steam, developers are starting to get the hang of multithreaded code.

FSX and GTA4 and SupCom are the only titles i know for sure take full advantage of a quad core. more will surely come though. depends what you want your upgrade cycle length to be...