Medium detail affords us the luxury of shadows. In addition, the game will swap high-detail 3D props (like the cars) for low-detail versions of the same props when the object is farther away from the player's viewpoint when compared to the low-detail setting. Because of the inclusion of shadows, if your graphics card can handle it, we highly recommend the medium detail setting at the very least.

We begin with 1280x1024, and can see that the Radeon HD 4650 is already out of the running as a contender with its minimum frame rate of 22 FPS. The game is playable, but it's far from ideal. Meanwhile, all of the other cards are once again bottlenecked by the CPU. Only the GeForce 9600 GT is struggling to reach the average 65-75 FPS the other cards enjoy.

Upping the resolution to 1680x1050, the situation remains the same.

Even at 1920x1200, the CPU bottleneck is asserting itself as the primary performance limitation instead of the graphics cards.

At 2560x1600 we can see some definite leaders and followers in the range, but the margins are still surprisingly close. The GeForce 9600 GT has been slowed to choppy performance, but all of the higher-tier cards are averaging over 40 FPS and about 30 FPS minimum, which is still very smooth.
At this point, it is obvious that the game is extremely dependant on the speed of the platform and not on the speed of the graphics system. As long as a minimum level of graphics power is available, performance is very close across the spectrum.
- 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.