Benchmark Results: Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV is one of those console ports that has always seemed to favor Nvidia hardware. Here we see all of our cards present playable performance at 1680x1050 and, for the most part, 1920x1200. The only time there’s any real differentiation is when resolution jumps to 2560x1600.
At that point, the CrossFire’d Radeon HD 5870s don’t miss a beat, and the two GeForce GTX 285s maintain 60+ frame per second performance. The single 5870 edges out the GeForce GTX 285, but just barely.
What happened to the GTX 295? This is one of those cases where 896MB of memory per GPU just isn’t enough. The card runs out of GDDR3 and won’t do 2560x1600 at the detail settings we used to test. This is an important lesson. Just because the GTX 295 is tops in Nvidia’s lineup doesn’t mean it’s always the right tool for the job. When it comes to the highest resolutions and detail settings, you want at least 1GB per GPU, and 100MB can make a difference.
