GTA IV

The last title used on the testing sessions was GTA IV. The game allows the user to choose not only the texture quality, but also the rendering and the view distance. These three elements, together with the resolution, are heavy on the memory usage, and they can be a good measurement on how much is or isn’t used. And they also show, in the gaming options, the exact number of MB used for each of the options. A good tool to use. By simply maximizing the view distance, for example, there’s a high increase of memory usage. Putting the texture quality to high, the memory requirements go beyond the 1GB mark, which could mean a big difference in the extra GB that the solution we are reviewing has.

But let’s see the frames per second found when testing.

Medium textures - high rendering - view distance: 50


Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 47
- 1920×1200 - 56

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 47
- 1920×1200 - 56

Medium texture - high rendering - visual distance: 100

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 45
- 1920×1200 - 55

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 45
- 1920×1200 - 55

As we can see, there’s absolutely no difference in performances up until when the extra GB is needed in order to play with high textures and the maximum view distance. In this case, we haven’t performed the testing as it would have been impossible to compare with the 1GB Overclocked version of the GTX285. Only in that scenario, when a user wants to set this game to the maximum view distance and the maximum texture quality, we can see a real difference for the second GB on the Gigabyte solution.