How can I get better frame rates on GTA IV?

[El_Mayo]

I know this thread is like 2 years late
but I adjusted the graphics settings to use about 998/1009 mb of my graphics card and it's running slow

I thought it would run fine as long as it doesn't go over 1009 in the settings?
But I heard you can edit config files to get better frame rates etc. etc.

 

[erocker]

Rebuild the game from the ground up and it should help. Other than that, lower settings, perhaps try some visual mods.

 

[El_Mayo]

Rebuild the game from the ground up and it should help. Other than that, lower settings, perhaps try some visual mods.

Oh I installed it and it runs alright with some stuff reduced
but just thought seeing as you can edit the command files there would be tweaks and stuff, much like fallout had that .dll file that gave you better performance

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

overclock alot GTA IV is cpu limited most of the time crank the clock speed up and you will see an improvement keeping slighly lower settings will help as well.

 

[El_Mayo]

overclock alot GTA IV is cpu limited most of the time crank the clock speed up and you will see an improvement keeping slighly lower settings will help as well.

o i thought my cpu was rad and could handle it
I might overclock
any idea which settings give the biggest hit to performance?

 

[Flibolito]

View distance if I remember takes up alot of Vram and CPU power. 4GHz should have been on the recommended list for the game

 

[trickson]

Get a second HD5770 and run crossfire ? I love mine and they are great in crossfire .

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

nope i dont remember for the life of me, but i do know more cores and more mhz = more fps usually with GTA IV, going from say

3400 on the cpu 2000 on the nb to

3800 2400 i saw an average frame rate increase of 6fps on average and minimum frame rate jumped 4 fps so it alls relative whatever extra performance you can squeeze out will help

and GTA IV dosent support multi gpu in fact with 2x 6970s the game refuses to allow me to change any GPU settings in game period it sits red lined at 200mb out of 2048 and im stuck at 800x600
if i turn crossfire off all is well every setting works and game plays fine.

 

[T3kl0rd]

Game works for me in SLI.

That card isn't powerful enough to run modern games by itself, you need at least another.

This game was designed to run around 30 FPS on modern high end systems @ max settings. It is one of those "games for future PCs". Rockstar actually stated that.

 

[AsRock]

Game works for me in SLI.

That card isn't powerful enough to run modern games by itself, you need at least another.

This game was designed to run around 30 FPS on modern high end systems @ max settings. It is one of those "games for future PCs". Rockstar actually stated that.

There's no performance increase by having more than one card SLI or CF as the game don't support it.

GTA is tricky to get perfect and like some have said overclocking the cpu will help and it surly does. The other thing you can do is each time you change the settings restart the game as i found out the game don't give the true performance of the new settings all the time and some times can be really bad.

 

[Taskforce]

Game works for me in SLI.

That card isn't powerful enough to run modern games by itself, you need at least another.

This game was designed to run around 30 FPS on modern high end systems @ max settings. It is one of those "games for future PCs". Rockstar actually stated that.

Worst PORT for the PC evar! even in the future you wouldn't want to be playing such a ugly game, Rockstar did a shit job no excuses will fix that.

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

Game works for me in SLI.
It is one of those "games for future PCs".

Hah. Don't fall for that bs.

I haven't tried that game yet since having crossfire again. I should give it a whirl soon...

 

[T3kl0rd]

There's no performance increase by having more than one card SLI or CF as the game don't support it.

GTA is tricky to get perfect and like some have said overclocking the cpu will help and it surly does. The other thing you can do is each time you change the settings restart the game as i found out the game don't give the true performance of the new settings all the time and some times can be really bad.

Hah. Don't fall for that bs.

I haven't tried that game yet since having crossfire again. I should give it a whirl soon...

I just tested GTA IV with SLI both on and off and I can say with 100% confidence that both of you have no idea what you are talking about. They patched in SLI support with their patches. FPS is improved dramatically in SLI. Both cards are being utilized in Afterburner, I checked before I posted. Too bad SLI doesn't literally double the FPS or I would be locked @ 54, the max for this game.

Worst PORT for the PC evar! even in the future you wouldn't want to be playing such a ugly game, Rockstar did a shit job no excuses will fix that.

The city with all its massive buildings are a beast to render. The slowest part of Just Cause 2 BY FAR is the Panau City area. My framerate drops off from locked @ 60 to even as low as 15 FPS there. Makes me realize what Rockstar had to work with. GTA IV looks nice at max settings. Playing @ 1920x1200 helps with the lack of AA support.

This is the reason I wonder if BF3 will run for anyone any higher than 30 FPS. You play in cities with massive buildings that are fully destructible. Destructible environments always bring framerates down. That and it looks photo realistic. Look forward to benchmarks.

 

[BondExtreme]

GTA IV has such a horrible engine. Kinda remind me of the Crysis 1 engine. hehe.
Frames are almost never good in that game unless you have a $3000 PC it seems. :/
Correct me otherwise

 

[T3kl0rd]

GTA IV has such a horrible engine. Kinda remind me of the Crysis 1 engine. hehe.
Frames are almost never good in that game unless you have a $3000 PC it seems. :/
Correct me otherwise

Everyone wants this game to run locked @ 60 FPS (54 is the max actually). It is a quad core game and you need a high end card for it to run okay, they tell you that up front with the system requirements. It is one of those "Games for future PCs" as previously stated. Latest nVidia WHQL drivers help the FPS department. Actually, Rockstar did a great job with the port and the patches improved performance more than significantly. They are rendering a truckload of data onscreen all at once. PC version runs better than the console versions, everyone's expectations of how PC games should run are much higher.

Crysis was released before quads caught on. That is a shame because the game would be locked @ 60 FPS for a lot of people otherwise. Hopefully Crysis 3 will get back to the game's roots of innovation. If it is another console port, chances are it won't.

 

[streetfighter 2]

Since you only have 4GB of ram I'd say it's rather important that you close as many background programs as possible before launching. Perhaps use a memory trimming tool, like mine .

Overclocking your gpu a bit will help a lot. Also get that 1055T up around 3.2-3.4GHz. In my experience GTAIV uses about 3 cores max (though the threads may distribute evenly giving it the appearance that it's using all of your cores).

Since your system is so similar to mine, here's what my in game settings are:
1920x1080 @ 60Hz
Texture Quality: High
Reflection Resolution: High
Water Quality: Very High
Shadow Quality: High
Night Shadows: Off
Texture Filter Quality: Anisotropic x4
View Distance: 25
Details Distance: 31
Vehicle Density: 51
Definition: On
Vsync: On

I also use "Disable Desktop Composition" on the GTAIV executable to free up an extra one or two MB of video ram .

There are also some command line options for the main executable that you can fiddle around with.

Frames are almost never good in that game unless you have a $3000 PC it seems. :/
Correct me otherwise

Plays fine on my PC and it looks brilliant too. When I played it on the PS3 and the 360 I was horrified by the terrible graphics and frame rates.

 

[newtekie1]

I seem to remember turning off the recording feature seems to really help framerates, I can't remember what it is called, and I can be bothered to re-install to tell you, but I know that really helped performance.

 

[El_Mayo]

Since you only have 4GB of ram I'd say it's rather important that you close as many background programs as possible before launching. Perhaps use a memory trimming tool, like mine .

Overclocking your gpu a bit will help a lot. Also get that 1055T up around 3.2-3.4GHz. In my experience GTAIV uses about 3 cores max (though the threads may distribute evenly giving it the appearance that it's using all of your cores).

Since your system is so similar to mine, here's what my in game settings are:
1920x1080 @ 60Hz
Texture Quality: High
Reflection Resolution: High
Water Quality: Very High
Shadow Quality: High
Night Shadows: Off
Texture Filter Quality: Anisotropic x4
View Distance: 25
Details Distance: 31
Vehicle Density: 51
Definition: On
Vsync: On

I also use "Disable Desktop Composition" on the GTAIV executable to free up an extra one or two MB of video ram .

There are also some command line options for the main executable that you can fiddle around with.


Plays fine on my PC and it looks brilliant too. When I played it on the PS3 and the 360 I was horrified by the terrible graphics and frame rates.

oh that's where I might have been goin' wrong

"View Distance: 25
Details Distance: 31
Vehicle Density: 51"

I dragged my details and vehicle ones to 100 because it didn't show that it was using more graphics memory XD

 

[LifeOnMars]

GTA IV is all about the CPU. Get a Sandy bridge chip, clock it to 4.5GHz or over and it owns the game. I play at 2048x1536 with a HD 5870 . No stutters and framerate drops at all, smooth as silk. I only have a 2500K, I daresay a 2600K would decimate the game.

 

[Thrackan]

<snip>It is one of those "Games for future PCs" as previously stated. </snip>

The PC version of the game is from December 2008. How much of a future PC do you want?

 

[MLG The Canadian]

I have a buddy who worked for Rockstar Toronto, and I've heard nothing but bad about the engine and how badly it is optimized for PC. It's just a badly made PC port, honestly. They didn't even add animations for some of the guns in certain scenarios. It's a half-assed port.

Even with my system it averages around 35 fps and dips sometimes, and that's with the view distance/detail distance sliders at under 33% and shadows at low lol, rediculous.

 

[LifeOnMars]

GTA IV is all about the CPU. Get a Sandy bridge chip, clock it to 4.5GHz or over and it owns the game. I play at 2048x1536 with a HD 5870 . No stutters and framerate drops at all, smooth as silk. I only have a 2500K, I daresay a 2600K would decimate the game.

I also set the Detail distance and vehicle density to 100% but I do turn off the night shadows as the HD 5870 just can't handle it at my res with the 1.7 patch.

MLG - that sounds like really low fps tbh, I never dip below 45(normally always over 50fps)

 

[MLG The Canadian]

Lucky you.

Edit: it's your processor. I probably need to overclock, although I don't think it's safe with the stock 1090T cooler.

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

overclock alot GTA IV is cpu limited most of the time crank the clock speed up and you will see an improvement keeping slighly lower settings will help as well.

I played it with a GTX295, comming from a GTX480 way back just to test on same proc speed. It really chugged down even if I lowered the graphic settings to fit video mem spec

 

[warup89]

GTA IV is all about the CPU. Get a Sandy bridge chip, clock it to 4.5GHz or over and it owns the game. I play at 2048x1536 with a HD 5870 . No stutters and framerate drops at all, smooth as silk. I only have a 2500K, I daresay a 2600K would decimate the game.

I can confirm this.

-I also noticed that the game does not support Xfire, because when its on, all of my settings go to lowest and my "available memory" goes red even though it says 200/4096 .