Both the Radeons and GeForces demonstrate a similar level of quality when 4x AA is enabled:

Here we see the CPU limitation we're so used to in this game. The Radeon HD 4650 is knocked out of the competition, but the rest of the cards are still in the game.

At 1680x1050, we're beginning to see a slight advantage trend in favor of the ATI cards.

At 1920x1200, the Radeons increasingly show their strength when AA is enabled. The GeForce 9600 GT is still demonstrating playable performance, but for some reason the GeForce 8800 GT sample is struggling, even though we re-ran the tests to see if it was an anomaly.

At the highest 2560x1600 resolution, we're seeing some problems. At first glance I wondered if some cards were suffering from some sort of driver glitch, but Chris Angelini pointed out the elephant in the room: all of the cards that failed to produce playable performance at this setting are the 512 MB cards. The 796 MB and 1 GB cards are all able to produce much higher performance numbers at this high resolution with 4x anti-aliasing. In any case, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB walks away with a win as the only single card we've tested that is powerful enough to play the game at this resolution and AA level smoothly. The GeForce GTX 260 is on the razor's edge of playability and could be used at these settings if the player found it acceptable.
- 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.