Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA 4) Message Board  

I have an ATI Radeon HD 5870 that comes OC out of the box (950MHz GPU and 1250MHz Memory clock), so naturally I thought it could tackle a two-year-old game that itself was using tech that was four years old. When I went to the Graphics options menu and turned everything up to it's maximum value (after getting the latest patch, there's a lot more options to play with), the game tells me it expects to use 900+/1007MB of my video memory! And that's with the View Distance value set to 30 (View Distance and Night Shadows seemed to affect the Memory Usage the most). If I tried to set it to it's maximum value of 100, the game told me it would have used 1700+/1007MB.

When I ran the Benchmark test, it told me it used ~95% of the card's resources, ~70% of my RAM (I have 4GB) , and ~65% of my CPU (AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black). Given that the "Recommended Requirements" stated at the game's release were "Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz, AMD Phenom X3 2.1Ghz" and "Memory: 2 GB (Windows XP) 2.5 GB (Windows Vista)" and "Video Card: 512MB NVIDIA 8600 / 512MB ATI 3870", I think something is wrong with the game is calculating it's resource usage. Unless of course there was a total engine overhaul with the Episodes updates. But even then, during the Benchmark, I didn't see a whole lot during the demonstration that said "This game needs two 1GB cards to max its potential".

On a side note, why was this game retired? Was it because Rockstar released their final patch for the game (I haven't seen any news from them saying they wouldn't release anymore updates)? Or was it the same as with Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD, where you guys just got tired of constantly writing new trainers? Or all updates going to be released under the "Episodes" heading from now on?