Rockstar's most popular GTA series got a new addition a year back (i guess), GTA4. I finally got a chance of running GTA4 on my PC and it given pretty hard time to the PC even more than the Most popular nvidia inclined Crysis. It was quite amazing that the game graphics itself were not really that revolutionary at all as compared to other games in the market but the overall performance that it was able to squeeze of the PC was disturbing.

 Back in PS2 days, one of my favourite games were Bully again by Rockstar, it worked quite well on PS2 given the harware resources available to PS2. The very same Bully got released on PC, with little change in name Bully: Scholarship Edition, except the name, nothing was quite changed in the game. Those of you who played Bully on PC can easily smell that GTA 4 is having same problems, bad hardware resources management. Both Bully and GTA 4 and unable to utilize CPU/RAM/GPU properly. Even if you meet minimum/recommended specifications set by rockstar for either of the games, there are no guarantees on some level of performance that you will get out of your harware that you call, beefy.

 
So here are some details about whats wrong with Rockstar's GTA4

Test System:

Intel Core 2 Duo (E6550) 2.33GHz@1333
Intel DG33FB Motherboard
3GB Corsair Ram @ 667
XFX 4850 512MB
WD 320GBx2
600W Cooler Master PSU

Cod 4 - Maxed out all the way 1024x1280

Average FPS : 60 - 65
Min FPS: 30
Max FPS: 85

Cod 4 - Maxed out all the way 1600x1200

Average FPS: 40-45
Min FPS: 25
Max FPS: 72

GTA 4 - 1024x1280 - Settings Preset by Rockstar

Average FPS: 25-30
Min FPS: 15
Max FPS: 40

Now above are not playable frames rates at all, even with a quite a beefy PC as compared with the minimum requirements for this game (you may argue with the beefiness of the test system but when a game is supposed to run on consoles with 256 MB shared Ram between CPU/GPU, its got to give better or at least equivalent results on PC). Rockstar patched up the game, but still performance is not there, funny part is this game is neither inclined to Nvidia (sometimes a little, because nvidia trying hard to improve drivers for it) nor ATI, i guess this game is probably a port to PC, in which a program is emulating some console (PS3 or Xbox 360) on our PC's, and thats probably why hardware resources are not utilized well.