GTA IV (PC) : Buyer Beware

I strolled into my local Best Buy last evening with the thought in my head, "I want to spend some money today." Having glanced over the computer hardware department, the console games department, etc, I stumbled into the PC games section. The glorious and glimmering faccades of the latest titles seemed almost overwhelming to have to choose from, the shelf seemingly giving me an evil cackle. Then, enter my dilemma: Flight Sim X, or GTA IV? I, after much deliberation and internal turmoil, brought both packages to my roommate, who promptly initiated a game of "pick which hand it's in". Selecting his right hand, a box labeled "Grand Theft Auto IV" came out. I glanced over the system requirements to see if my rig could hold it's own playing this title. I read the following off the box:

Minimum Spec:
1.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo
1.5 GB RAM
nVidia 7900 or better
16 GB HDD space

I got it home, and in a flurry of anticipation for the new features GTA IV has to offer over the console variety, unraveled the packaging and quickly installed. After installation, I decided to look for some patches to see if there was anything needed to run this behemoth of a game. Sure enough, Rockstar had been good little boys and girls (unlike Bethesda, it would appear) and released a patch to assess performance issues.

And there it was, the Social Club splash screen, with the big button screaming "Play" to me. I crammed the LMB into the mouse and off it went. Now, the first thing any respectable gamer does is not to play the game right off the bat, but tweak the settings for good performance. Going into the options menu I spied some neat features, but didn't find nearly the amount of graphics options as, say, Fallout 3. Figuring that, since my computer fell somewhere between minimum and recommended spec, I'd set everything on moderate quality. "Ooo! A benchmarking button!", I said, elated to finally see such a feature. I opened the benchmarking tool and waited patiently to see my first glimpse of how this game would run. Before I continue, here are my system specs:

Dell Vostro 1500 Gaming Notebook
Core 2 Duo 1.4Ghz
2GB RAM
nVidia 8600M GT (Core clock: 475/900/400)
DirectX v9.0c
250GB 5400RPM Seagate HDD
Windows XP Media Center Edition

A respectable, albeit not top-of-the-line mobile gaming rig, no? Apparently, according to Rockstar, I was wrong. I felt pity overwhelm me as my poor little Vostro displayed the "action" on the screen at a rate reserved for real-time Etch-A-Sketch slideshows. Mind you, this rig has run EVERY other DX9.0c app that it's come across with ease. Fallout 3, GRID, Call of Duty 4, etc all run without issue on this rig. Much to my bewilderment, after having sat through a 5 minute presentation that should have lasted one minute, I quickly decided to adjust some settings. Draw distance, "rendering" (whatever that means, apparently things like AA, Anisotropic Filtering, and other elements cannot be adjusted individually), and textures took a hit. I rebooted the game and tried again.

Nay, not even lowering those settings would spare my poor rig. It struggled to maintain a double-digit framerate as what now appeared to be an actual movie, rather than a slideshow blazed across the screen at 10.33 frames per second. "Ok, we're making progress" I thought.

Again I lowered the settings down, this time to bare minimum spec, but maintaining my 1280x800 native resolution. Surely, this would help. No bacon... 11 FPS...

I lowered the resolution down to 800x600, "No way it's going to lag now!", I thought. Wrong... 12FPS...

I then resorted to opening up my trusty RivaTuner and overclocked my GPU from 475/900/400 to 625/1425/525 to see what would happen. To my shock and amazement, the game actually ran at a moderately-annoying 15-18 FPS! I had succeeded in life, bringing my rig to it's knees only to run a game that I was told could be ran at moderate spec on barebones minimum spec only while overclocked to the maximum that my GPU would tolerate... Lose...

How is it that a company can advertise a game to be capable of running on a low-end gaming rig and put it on the shelf knowing that it can only be run by the most 1337 of monolithic supercomputers found only in a lab somewhere deep in nVidia's HQ? I've even read reports of this "game" bottlenecking quad core processors. This is inexcusable...

Rockstar has had an entire year to play with the code, test it, perfect it; and they did not deliver. This has to be the most inefficient DX9 graphics engine I've seen to date. I shudder to think what this pathetic excuse for a slideshow would do to their minimum-spec GPU listed on the box, an nVidia 7900. Thoughts of this game running on DX10 may cause: nausea, heartburn, dizziness, thoughts of suicide, and/or death.

This was going to be a game review but I can't even get the damned game to run...

Next item, please... Before I hurt something...



UPDATE:

I have done some research on the performance issues surrounding this game. It would appear that they are caused by a lack of CPU power. Ok, so, Rockstar is essentially justifying their shortcomings by saying that my processor is 400 Mhz short of peak performance? Please... There's more to it than that. While I'm willing to accept the fact that my computer just isn't good enough to run this game, I'd rather Rockstar just tell me that up front, rather than candy coat it by listing min spec CPU speed as 1.8 Ghz. Also, what happened to the option found in Crysis to turn down Physics rendering? Why didn't Rockstar take advantage of the PhysX engine from nVidia, which utilizes GPU resources (with significantly more processors) instead of CPU resources to calculate physics? These are questions that need to be answered.