Also ensure your monitor is running at a high enough vertical refresh rate (use the utility refreshlock) mine runs 120 Hz for 640x480 & 800x600. I'd stay away from beta software.
GTA3 runs gr8 on my PC: -
Athlon 750Mhz (T'bird), GeForce2 64MB, 384 MB Crucial CAS2 PC133 SDRAM,MSI K7T Pro-2A, 40 GB IBM Deskstar ATA100 HDD, SB Live! 1024, Intel Pro 100+ nic, Motorola Surfboard Cable Modem, Windows 2000 proff SP2.
Admiral LSD & One_2_three,
The user interface (joystick/joypad/mouse etc...) available on the PC plus the extra computational power allows the PC to be a better platform for games than currently available consoles. Btw how is the PS2 optimied for games it's got a Sony RISC CPU (emotion engine), Sony graphics chip, Rambus RDRAM, Sony motherboard, DVD drive. The Sony OS that runs on the Sony PS2 computer just has limited set of services running on it. Since I've hardened/optimsed my Windows 2000 build for games is my PC a console?