We scrutinized both GeForce and Radeon screen captures and came to the following conclusion: the image quality is close between the two competitors, but the Nvidia drivers and hardware generate darker shadows than their ATI counterparts, which is a difference we also observed in our Burnout Paradise analysis.

Which is better? That's certainly subjective. And to be honest, we didn't notice the difference until we directly compared screenshots. After we realized the difference, we noticed that the Nvidia cards would give us nice depth when the sun was in a position to provide good shadows. Alternatively, when we were deep within the cityscape and under the shadows of buildings, the Nvidia cards delivered a darker city with less contrast and definition compared to the Radeon cards.

However, neither of these issues is a game-changer. And as we said above, we never really noticed them until we directly compared the screenshots. We'd be happy to play the game on either camp's hardware from an image quality point of view.
But what about performance? To answer that question, let's move on to the benchmarks.
- Introduction
- Image Quality Settings
- Image Quality: Radeon Versus GeForce
- Test System And Benchmark Settings
- Benchmark Results: Low Detail
- Benchmark Results: Medium Detail
- Benchmark Results: High Detail
- Benchmark Results: High Detail With 4x Anti-Aliasing
- CPU Benchmarks: Clock Speeds And Cores
- Conclusion
At the least, it'll convince people that their older rigs -can- run it. It's basically an optimized and mostly un-buggy Web Of Shadows engine; I'd expect a 7800GT could probably run it okay.
In action it's much better than these screenshots. It pulls a lot of the same tricks MGS4 does on the PS3, where you can tell it's not actually doing that much processing but it looks like it is. Screenshots don't do the game justice because you rarely see a texture or polygon for more than a few seconds at most; in action the particle effects are actually pretty impressive.
Even saints row, which has shit for graphics, runs close to the 2gb memory limit of 32bit games all the time - so perhaps this actually uses whatever is available?
I saw this game a few weeks ago running great on a laptop that usually does inventor stuff ... I don't know what processor was in it, but I bet no more than an old dualcore T something processor
One of the best games ever BTW!!
It's not fair to compare a pc game with graphics from a pocket calculator. gta if anything sports only gameplay. Graphics aren't a selling point for that title.
I think the answer is the lack of VRAM on the 8800GT which I believe only had 512Mb where as the 9600GT has a full 1Gb which eliminated any bottlenecks when processing all those textures with 4x AA being applied.
Anyway, keep articles like these coming.
So unless this CPU is the business (which it isn't on this platform), anyone with a computer that made in the last 3 years can run this game no problem.