Gamertell

For those of you who don’t already own Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s finally made the jump to the Steam network for direct-download purchase.

The game is not new, although there were quite a few people who were unable to get it when it was released for consoles. This is a bit of a holiday gift for both gamers and Rockstar Games: PC gamers get a great game, Rockstar Games gets more money which leads to more great games for you. See,  it balances out.

If you plan on getting the game, it will set you back $49.99. If you have a friend or family member who is a hardcore gamer that only has a PC, this would be a great gift them.

While it isn’t as demanding as some of the games coming out lately, you need a pretty beefy machine for the game. The required Operating System is either Windows Vista - SP1 or Windows XP - SP3. That’s simple enough. The processor is where the beef starts kicking in. If you don’t have a dual-core processor running at least 1.8 GHz, you might as well write off playing the game. For the RAM, you will need 1 GB for XP or 1.5 GB for Vista. For the graphics card you need at least a Nvidia 7900 or an ATI X1900 with 256 VRAM (and it’ll have to be DirectX 9.0c compliant). It also takes up about 16 GB of hard drive space and that’s without game saves. To help maximize enjoyment, you’ll also want a 5.1 channel audio card as well.

A lot of the newer computers tend to meet and beat these requirements with ease. However, if you have an older computer you will run into problems. If you are able to and can afford to upgrade the hardware that doesn’t quite meet up with the requirements of the games, by all means, do so. If you can’t, it looks like you’ll have to wait longer to be able to play this game.

Purchase [Grand Theft Auto IV] Read [Kotaku]