GTA 4 Gamers On a Budget

A couple people have asked me; what can I do to improve my GTA 4 PC performance without breaking my bank account.

I truly believe the key ingredients at a budget price ($500 or less) are a Solid State Drive (Sata 3 or PCI-E capable), 6GB minimum of system memory and a decent quad-core 3GHz+ processor. Notice I didn't mention anything about a GPU (graphic card).

A good SSD (Solid State Drive) will run you about $150, depending on the manufacture and drive size. You can find a 120GB SSD around that price, and improve the performance of cache/swap/load of textures and data, within GTA 4 immensely. Even coming from a 15k rpm SAS Cheetah drive, it couldn't hold a candle against my current SSD setup. Texture pop-up is barely nonexistent and you can net 7-10fps more over a standard hard drive.

I say at minimum you should have 6GB of system memory when running GTA 4, OS background functions and whatever else is going on with your system. Depending on your OS (Windows 7 64-Bit Ultimate in my case) will automatically take/reserve 1-2GB of system memory for certain OS operations. The more memory the better... plus system memory is fairly cheap these days, so invest $100 or so into it... assuming you have 4GB already installed.

A good quad-core CPU *cough* Intel *cough* would vastly improve your GTA 4 performance, amongst other things. I would admit GTA 4 is poorly coded for the PC, using mostly its console brethren code... however it's not unplayable compared to other shoehorned game console ports. Anyhow, GTA 4 is very CPU dependent/bound, so having a dual-core processor at 2GHz or even 3GHz is barely passing IMHO. So, invest in a good 3GHz quad-proc, with a good chunk of cache (pun not intended). $100-300

Theses suggestions are reflective of people with modern/current hardware that can support these upgrades at the suggested budget price. These should be your first priorities before investing in a GPU, which is why I did not mention or feel was important at this particular quick budget upgrade. Anyhow, just my two cents....

Edited June 4, 201213 yr by Nutt