GTA IV on Dell Inspiron 15R

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I had been playing Grand Theft Auto IV on my new Dell Inspiron 15R N5010 for last 2 days and I have so much to say that I wonder if I would be able to keep you interested or not! Oh well! I will try my best anyway!

Installation

This game’s installation procedure is one of the most troublesome installation procedures I have faced to date. Nevertheless, that is just my opinion. The processor, Core i3 350M and 3GB DDR3 RAM do a really good job in keeping a significantly less installation time than my desktop computer, i.e. Pentium D and 2GB DDR2 RAM.

Therefore, even if we have to deal with two DVD’s, a release date check, and a serial key check, the whole process takes less than half an hour. I watched Ben 10 Alien Force while I was installing the game. Therefore, I did not feel that half an hour have passed and I did not get bore either. When I was finally done with all the checks and approval processes. I installed all the official patches to improve the infamous performance of GTA IV for PC.

I could not find 1.0.5.0 and 1.0.6.0 patches online, but I installed all others as well as 1.0.7.0, which was released to remove the necessity of Rockstar Social Club application. This patch uninstalled the application and embedded a sign-up/sign-in window that pops up when you click on GTA IV icon to play the game.

Whole procedure took 45-minutes of my day, but in the end I was satisfied that now I’d be able to check my new laptop’s gaming performance or tolerance, whatever it may be.

CPU Usage and Temperature

Pentium D (my old friend for last 5 years) used to feel a load of 100% whenever I clicked to play this game. Not any more sir, this new laptop with Core i3 350, man it’s really something. The load or CPU usage hangs like a pendulum from 27% to 35% depending on the environment of the game (I know you got me).

The fan is a little disappointment to me because it is little! Yeah! That is the only reason for my hatred for the fan. Because of the size and vent position, I feel hot air (not warm!!) blowing out on  my left thigh when I keep this friend while I am sitting on a chair or something like that. It can get really hot and I like it sometimes, when I forget to increase the temperature of AC and things start to get pretty cold around me.

Anyway, back to our Processor; it really keeps its promise as a mainstream processor as well as gaming. You know that this processor is based on Quad architecture, it performs really nice than other CPU’s for the same range. The processor can take the complete load of every configuration that GTA IV has to offer and remains as cool and silent as it must be.

Apart from GTA IV, the system works like a charm and every application opens, runs and closes like a snap. It is a completely different experience for a person who never laid his/her hands on a processor from ‘Core I’ family.

As for the temperature, I think it is normal in comparison to few of my friend’s laptops and personally, my old mate, Lenovo Y410. You may not want to put this laptop on your lap while playing some intense game like GTA IV or running a powerful application like Maya or Protein Intensifier. However, for other jobs, like checking mails, working on MS word and application like these, the laptop really keeps itself cool and you can put it on your lap to justify its meaning and work at your ease.

Graphics Performance

I am very much impressed with ATI Mobility 5470 1 GB in this laptop. I did not compromise for a 512 MB version and I have a very good reason for that. In GTA IV we can see the resource usage as we adjust the graphical settings like texture, shadows, reflection, resolution, vehicle density, view distance, etc.

Therefore, even when I kept everything at medium, the resource usage ate up 466 MB of my graphical memory and that’s close 512 MB. So, I am just glad that I have a 1 GB version. I didn’t want to buy 512 MB version because I wanted to keep VRAM free for OS and some other applications. That’s an understandable thing, isn’t it?

The graphical performance is pretty nice at medium settings. This card is for mainstream users with a little gaming-heart, not for hardcore gamers. Still, it can handle all games to date and will support many others to come in future.

Average FPS (frames per second) are, 19 FPS as per the in-game benchmarking tool and it is a playable score. I do not feel any problems while playing this game, again at medium settings. When I lower the settings (I cannot increase them because the games stutters a bit when I increase the settings), the game looks a little odd but on the other hand is much more playable than before. However, for the pleasure of my eyes, I do not do this.

I mean, I like this game because of the lovely environment, how can I lower it further, it might look like some old dumb game!

However, I do have few words on this one. The shadows look choppy and the edges look like somebody just sliced every corner of the game. This could be because of medium settings but even when I dared to increase the settings, the shadows still looked horrible and edges looked like someone sliced every corner with a Katana rather than with a Saw.

I will update the drivers after a few days, but until then, I’ll have to deal with these graphical nightmares. Even with all of these problems, the game is still a lot of fun and I can loosen myself after a tiring day. Rather than taking a nap, I love to shoot people around and jacking sports car, something that I would never do in real life.

Conclusion

Dell Inspiron 15R N5010 deals with GTA IV quite fairly and I am not even a bit worried about the mainstream capabilities of ATI Mobility 5470 1 GB graphics card. I love my new system and I love the way it deals with every application quickly.
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