Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 Super Overclock

If you look up the definition for “controversy”, Grand Theft Auto should be listed. If it’s not, then that should be a crime, because throughout GTA’s many titles, there’s been more of that than you can shake your fist at. At the series’ beginning, the games were rather simple, and didn’t stir up too much passion in certain opposers. But once GTA III and its successors came along, its developers enjoyed all the controversy that came their way, and why not? It helped spur incredible sales numbers.

Grand Theft Auto IV is yet another continuation in the series, though it follows no storyline from the previous titles. Liberty City, loosely based off of New York City, is absolutely huge, with much to explore. This is so much so the case, that you could literally spend hours just wandering around, ignoring the game’s missions, if you wanted to. It also happens to be incredibly stressful on today’s computer hardware, similar to Crysis.

Manual Run-through: After the first minor mission in the game, you reach an apartment. Our benchmarking run starts from within this room. From here, we run out the door, down the stairs and into an awaiting car. We then follow a specific path through the city, driving for about three minutes total.

Despite the fact that GTA IV is an absolutely glutton of a game when it comes to system resources, increasing the resolution makes little difference in the overall performance, except on cards with lower amounts of memory. This game is one in particular that could actually see an improvement with 2GB of GDDR, as choosing the High or Very High texture settings really demand lots of memory.

Although this game feels somewhat sluggish even when it’s running well, I found the gameplay to be more than playable with our 2560×1600 settings. The only card so far able to go even higher has been the dual-GPU GTX 295.