What card to get?

[anderson2005]

Hey guys, I don't know of any of you are familiar with GTA IV but I've seen some youtube videos where the the textures are so clear that is almost looks like real life.

My question is this, how can I get my game to look that good? is it the processor? the graphics card? both? something else?

I'm confused as what to do next. I know my PC isn't the greatest but surely I don't need to invest in a new RIG just to play this game with a good picture?

 

[anderson2005]

Oh, I currently have an ATI Radeon HD 4800/4850. what should I upgrade to? :S

 

[3t3P]

You will want/neeed a quadcore processor clocked as highly as possible, GTA4 actually uses and loves quadcores, my experience became smoother when moving from dual to the spec in my sig.

You will want 4gb of ram

You will want a relatively decent graphics card with as much on board memory as possible, 1GB+, people say it isn't AS dependent on the graphics card but still you want something decent.

Sounds like you've seen modded footage of GTA 4, yea it will look nice but come with a performance hit though

whats the rest of your pc like and how much do you want to spend to run this one game?

 

[bells]

You have to have a budget to get an answer to that question

 

[anderson2005]

Well I just wanted a rough idea bells...

thank you 3t3P, for the information I guess I now need to start brainstorming what I want to do. I think the vids I saw were modded =\ hmm.

Manufacturer Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model M61PME-S2
CPU AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
Cpu Socket Socket AM2 (940)

Thats my motherboard and CPU I have 4GB of DDR2 in this machine too.

I found this site where you can custom build ur PC dino something or other it is, seems fairly cheaply priced and I'll be comparing it with what overclockers can offer me. I'd rather get it from here since I've always bought from here plus it would take 1-2 weeks for them to send me it lol.

 

[HW91]

to play GTAIV like that you'll need a quad core or hex core, ideally i7 or phenom II x6 and a 2GB 5870 or GTX 480

 

[stulid]

use to run fine on my 955BE and GTX260 216sp

no need to spend silly money on a i7 or hex core for that game.

after looking at the cpu support list, you can pop in a decent cpu into your board, and that may be enough to remove the bottleneck your existing 4850 card is no doubt experiencing, then see how the game plays, if still not happy get a GTX460 which will be ample.