GTA3 and idle temps?

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Somthing weird happend today. Well first off GTA3 did stutter for me like mad. Then a couple of other games. Did this on both old and new setup. SO then I changed back from ati 8500 to G3 to test it. While doing so it appears my ATI's mem is getting really hot cause its fading some and hazing whitish colored. Not GOOD. Never been oclocked either.....It did at first run the game very fast but then stutters came from no where and have been since. But thats another story. So the G3 VisionTek orig. runs like a champ on it. Before 640x480 even probs. Now playing it at 1280x1024 32bit max details not one stutter ever. Couldnt be better. Before my temps were norm. but now my temp mon. reads like 1c higher than idle when done playing for like a hour. Weird. It appears that GTA3 runs almost entirly from the video card and ram with the cpu at min useage. Which makes sense seeing how its ported from ps2 which has no hdd and is pretty cpu limited. Just thought I would share that. THanks for reading.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe (nforce2)
XP 2200+ Tbred-A
512mb 256mbx2 for dual kingston pc2700 cas 2.5
wd800jbl drive ata100 8mb cache 80gig
VisionTek G3 orig. First G3 ever!:D
Other irrelevant stuff!:x