Grand Theft Auto 4 PC: Resource Hog Edition

March 13th, 2009

MS / Windows

Sitting next to me is 4 PC, I got it for Christmas by a keen-eyed family member who snatched it up at Walmart before it went out of stock. Now I’ve been a big fan of the GTA series for a long time. I even upgraded my desktop computer to run GTA SA when it was released by getting a 256MB Nvidia graphics card. Not cheap when you’re working with no PCI Express slots on an older motherboard.

GTA 4 PC

But it’s not like my computer is super duper old. I built it a few years ago for next to nothing on TigerDirect.com. It’s a single core 3Ghz Intel Celeron D, 1.5GB RAM, 200GB EIDE HDD, and a 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6200. The 3Ghz Celeron in there was one of the first released of that speed, so the PCChips board is maxed out — no room to upgrade the CPU, and since there’s no PCIe, no real upgrade room for the graphics card. Not a cheap way anyway.

It runs GTA SA smooth and a lot of other games I have on there, including Call of Duty 4, some random Simulator games, etc. But unfortunately, and to my surprise, GTA 4 doesn’t run at all. Unless you call 1-3 frames per second “running.” More like dying. Not even in the absolute lowest setting. Hell, just the pre-game menu to configure everything runs slow as fucking shit. I even booted into Windows XP to save on some resources and it still doesn’t move any faster.

What gives, Rockstar Games? Do you think I want to throw more money into my useless Windows PC so I can jack cars, shoot innocent people, and listen to funny radio stations in a virtual world? Maybe later.

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Richard is a professional web developer and business consultant. He opened his first web hosting company at the age of 13 out of his bedroom on an ISDN connection and hasn't looked back since. Richard currently resides in sunny Florida.

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2 Responses to “Grand Theft Auto 4 PC: Resource Hog Edition”

  1. Nathan

    Lol, My dad caught me playing GTA3 couple of months back and he freaked out. He made me delete my free copy i downloaded. :(

  2. Thomas

    As you obviously already know, although most others do not, I now own that same copy you were referring to in this article (great trade btw) so as soon as I get it in the mail I’ll let you know how it runs.