GTA IV Performance

[xubidoo]

Rockstar have just revealed on our forum that a patch for GTA IV PC is due to be made available in the next few days. Here is what they had to say:

Driver News

We’re pleased to announce that in co-operation with Nvidia a new driver has been released that improves performance and fixes a major issue with 7900 series cards. If you haven’t gotten the driver yet download it here: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_gtaiv_downloads.html

ATI has also agreed to officially release Catalyst 8.12 which will release on Dec 10th from http://game.amd.com. Expect significant performance improvements when using this new driver.
Patch Is On The Way

We are working on making a patch available in the next few days. Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a Games For Windows – Live game the patch must be certified by Microsoft before release. The patch is already at Microsoft and we expect a speedy approval. The patch contains a variety of fixes including:

* A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
* Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
* Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
* Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
* Overall savings to memory
* Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
* Multiplayer character settings are preserved
* Support for DirectInput controllers. Note: The current hack way of supporting these controllers may not work with the improved functionality. So we recommend you remove the hack before upgrading to the patch.

Issues with power management software have also been fixed (slow speed, double speed issues). Even after the patch comes out setting power management software to maximum performance is recommended. We’ve seen cases where power management software does not detect the game is running and puts the CPU in green mode.

Besides the patch we’ve also improved the way the Social Club handles data this should have greatly reduced or eliminated the Mma10 error. If you are still receiving this error after logging in and out of Social Club we would like to know as much info as you can about it.


Source: http://www.gta4.net/news/index.php

[Wingo101]

Good news

[oli_ramsay]

Yeah, great news! Can't wait to play this game
Found this:


Seems a quad benefits quite a lot from this game. Multithreaded FTW!

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by xubidoo

We’re pleased to announce that in co-operation with Nvidia a new driver has been released that improves performance and fixes a major issue with 7900 series cards. If you haven’t gotten the driver yet download it here: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_gtaiv_downloads.html

ATI has also agreed to officially release Catalyst 8.12 which will release on Dec 10th from http://game.amd.com. Expect significant performance improvements when using this new driver.
Patch Is On The Way

We are working on making a patch available in the next few days. Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a Games For Windows – Live game the patch must be certified by Microsoft before release. The patch is already at Microsoft and we expect a speedy approval. The patch contains a variety of fixes including:

* A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
* Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
* Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
* Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
* Overall savings to memory
* Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
* Multiplayer character settings are preserved
* Support for DirectInput controllers. Note: The current hack way of supporting these controllers may not work with the improved functionality. So we recommend you remove the hack before upgrading to the patch.

Funny, with the way people talk about how poor the performance is on such high end hardware, you would think old hardware like the 7900 series and 1900 series wouldn't be able to play it at all...

[Steevo]

After playing awhile last night.


System Memory speed seems to make a huge impact on the way the game plays. Changing my timing had a two frame per second difference.

Plus you get a lot of texture corruption from over clocking your video memory to high. I changed mine too high and ended up with a lot of graphics corruption.

[newconroer]

Is this equally problematic in XP and Vista or?

[Irish_PXzyan]

hey guys.

I do plan on buying this for the PC but I am not so sure.
I have it for the PS3 tho.

With my system, should I expect to run this game on high settings??? Or should I expect lag??

Is this game even worth buying on PC???

[xubidoo]

it will probably run on high settings for u ,as u have 640mb vram ,but turning it down to Med doesnt seem to make it look much different and it does run a lot better.

altho if uve already got the PS3 version ,why would u want the PC ver ?
yes it has extras that the PS3/360 versions dont but i dont think they make a huge difference to the game.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by Irish_PXzyan

hey guys.

I do plan on buying this for the PC but I am not so sure.
I have it for the PS3 tho.

With my system, should I expect to run this game on high settings??? Or should I expect lag??

Is this game even worth buying on PC???

Don't expect all high, that is really the issue most are having, they expect the game to max out on their hardware, and whine if they have to lower settings.

However, you should have no problem with the game on medium, which blows the console version away in terms of graphics.

[Irish_PXzyan]

That's good enough for me!

Now I just have to decide if I should even bother with the PC version!

[newtekie1]

Personally, I wouldn't. I have it on the PS3, and got the PC version. Honestly, the PC version doesn't offer enough over the PS3/Xbox360 versions to justify the cost.

[Polarman]

I'll wait a bit before buying this game. Let driver issues and patches sort it out first.

I'm not in any hurry!

[Chryonn]

Re: the DRM, how many installs does it allow you, 3 or 5?

[newtekie1]

There is no install limit.

[Nick89]

GTA IV, the crysis killer.

[DrPepper]

It runs fine with me, idk what the problem is. Even all settings at the max it only goes about 20fps which isnt bad.

[jbunch07]

most people would consider 20fps unacceptable.

[newtekie1]

The Console version was capped at 30FPS, and it often dropped below that on my PS3. Though it is true, that most PC gamers don't consider 20FPS acceptable. Again, this goes to my point that PC gamers tend to be hard headed in their beliefs that every game should run at 60FPS+ on Max Settings, on their Mid-Range hardware, at extreme resolutions. And if that doesn't happen, then they usually whine about the game being un-optimized(which I don't know how they can claim that without looking at the code) and crappy.

[DrPepper]

Originally Posted by jbunch07

most people would consider 20fps unacceptable.

Actualy considering I have a single card that is two generations old and at max settings at 1680 x 1050 it isnt that bad.

Originally Posted by newtekie1

The Console version was capped at 30FPS, and it often dropped below that on my PS3. Though it is true, that most PC gamers don't consider 20FPS acceptable. Again, this goes to my point that PC gamers tend to be hard headed in their beliefs that every game should run at 60FPS+ on Max Settings, on their Mid-Range hardware, at extreme resolutions. And if that doesn't happen, then they usually whine about the game being un-optimized(which I don't know how they can claim that without looking at the code) and crappy.

So true, Especially with crysis, people claiming that the game is un-optimised simply because it doesn't run well on their 8600.

[FordGT90Concept]

a) Games only rake in a lot of money in the first 90 days on the shelf so, why make something that can't run on the best settings for two more years when people will have moved on to a different game by then?
b) The game got stuck on the loading screen twice so far. Requires ctrl+alt+del and termination to break it out of it.
c) I'm having a lot of problems with precaching not working properly. After playing about an hour, the world becomes gray except for a few things like street lights. I have to load a save for it to correct it.
d) Frequently, cutscenes seem to be held up for no apparent reason (the view doesn't pan or anything for about 30 seconds).

Hell, I don't think I have been able to play the game for longer than two hours without encountering one of the last three points. Comparing that to GTA I through GTA San Andreas, this game is riddled with bugs.


In addition to those issues, most of the cars drive like tanks. The brakes are ineffective as is the steering. As such, they behave like they are much heavier than they really are. The driving is much slower paced now than in the previous games because of it.

Overall, I like how they kept the general feel from the GTA3 games. It is also good on length but rather repetitive compared to the previous games.

[newtekie1]

a) The current high end hardware can max the game out.
b) Only twice? Fallout3 has crashed probably a dozen times on me, I still keep playing it. PC games crash, that is just what happens. I don't think I've seen a game come out in several years that didn't have some bugs in it at release.
c) I haven't experience this issue, but I don't doubt it exists. There are bound to be bugs in newly released games, it is what happens when you have so many different combinations of hardware and software to deal with.
d) Again, I haven't encounted this, but I'm sure it is one of those bugs that happen with initial game releases.

As for the cars, they seem to drive pretty much the same as the console version. The driving physics are very arcadish, they are meant to be like that.

[Steevo]

A) Would you dare make a game that has outdated graphics as soon as it was available?
B) No crashes, you just need alot of RAM.
C) Caching is a issue hotly debated, do it and you run the risk of making a system slow and unresponsive by overloading it unless they have top notch specs, don't do it and the people with top notch specs are crying as the load times from disk suck.
D) The cuscenes require more processing power from the tests I have done, they require huge amounts of textures to be moved around and loaded, more than any current graphics card has onboard, and thus the system memory gets involved, and then you have latentcy.



I got the 4850 Gb1 as I know this game was going to use it, and 4Gb of system memory running tight timings and fast still makes it cry for mercy.

[Mussels]

'poorly coded' means that no matter the hardware it doesnt run good. supreme commander is poorly coded with the AI, because even my CPU cant keep up in later games - you try and find a stock CPU as powerful as mine, and you'll see why the game is 'poor' - so few people can truly play it!

GTA IV aint so bad, as at least you can turn settings down til it works.

[mikey8684]

Has anyone been able to run this higher than Medium ?

I figure it has something to do with the Vram meter at the bottom of the graphics options.
Which is a pretty cool feature I think.

Anyway the game runs pretty good for me maxed out (Medium) @ 1920x1200 ... probs 20-30fps which im happy with for now ... ITS GTA IV FFS lol

[FordGT90Concept]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

b) Only twice? Fallout3 has crashed probably a dozen times on me, I still keep playing it. PC games crash, that is just what happens. I don't think I've seen a game come out in several years that didn't have some bugs in it at release.

True. The difference being is that GTA4 takes a good 3 minutes to get running again going through damned RGSC, lengthy "legal" screen, two rockstar images, another load screen, then you gotta freakin' drive all the way back to where you were. It also doesn't crash, it hangs. So that means another 15 seconds wasted terminating it. FO3 crashes to desktop so it only takes about two clicks and hardly any waiting to get very close to the point it crashed.

By the way, add a third tick to that hang-up list.

No game is perfect any more out of the box because of patching. They don't make them like they used to (that is, quality in a box).

Originally Posted by newtekie1

As for the cars, they seem to drive pretty much the same as the console version. The driving physics are very arcadish, they are meant to be like that.

My beef is they aren't as arcadish as GTA3. Seems like I spend all my time braking in GTA4 when in GTA3, it was all about going fast. Because of that, GTA3 and sons are much more exciting in chases and other high-speed events. GTA4 is pretty dull.

Originally Posted by Steevo

B) No crashes, you just need alot of RAM.

3 GiB isn't enough?

Originally Posted by Steevo

C) Caching is a issue hotly debated, do it and you run the risk of making a system slow and unresponsive by overloading it unless they have top notch specs, don't do it and the people with top notch specs are crying as the load times from disk suck.
D) The cuscenes require more processing power from the tests I have done, they require huge amounts of textures to be moved around and loaded, more than any current graphics card has onboard, and thus the system memory gets involved, and then you have latentcy.

Then why didn't they add a feature which vastly scales back on textures count? Seriously, I need only seven textures (they could just be solid colors too):
1. Building
2. Road
3. Me
4. Enemy
5. Friendly
6. Vehicle
7. Police
Why give me more than that if it is going to interrupt the flow of the gameplay?

Originally Posted by Steevo

I got the 4850 Gb1 as I know this game was going to use it, and 4Gb of system memory running tight timings and fast still makes it cry for mercy.

Ridiculous. I wonder how many returns GTA4 is going to get because they over-speced it.