Palit NVIDIA GTX460 in Surround: 1GB vs. 2GB - Grand Theft Autio IV

Genre: Action/Third Person Shooter
Surround Support: Good (some minor minigame blemishes)

Everything at maximum. Everything. Draw distance, the whole lot. Resolution varied. Save game loaded and a car taken for a spin.

To even get GTA IV to acknowledge Surround resolutions I needed to enable the –nomemlimit –norestrictions switches, and while the game would load to the menu at Surround resolutions, it would fail to load a savegame, just sitting on ‘Loading’ forever. I actually went to make dinner and eat it when waiting to see if GTA IV would do anything, and it was still supposedly ‘Loading’.

While the 2GB cards allowed GTA IV to load and play without issues. This was smooth and playable.

GTA IV is unique out of the games I’ve tested here for appearing to have a bit of a VRAM memory leak going on. While other games fill VRAM as they are loading, GTA IV starts off and uses nowhere near as much VRAM as it estimates it will for a particular setting and resolution. By the time you’ve been driving around for a few minutes, VRAM usage has just kept increasing and increasing. For example, on the 2GB cards when it first loads it uses less than 700MB of VRAM. That 1495MB value above is after five minutes or so of driving around.