(m15x) 8700M GT + GTA IV = FAIL

No matter what I do, I can't seem to get drivers to be stable with GTA IV.

So far, the only drivers that have worked have been 179.14. they don't crash or glitch... but I've heard there are optimizations in the 180.48 drivers that make the game run better. they only seem to crash for me.

I've tried just about every driver between 179.14 and 181 and everything seems to BSOD or severly glitch (to the point of being unplayable)

if the constant battle with the 'drunk affect' nearly 5 minutes into gameplay wasn't enough of an uphill climb... now they throw this BS at me.

. seriously.

 

Didn't they release drivers optimized just for GTA IV?

I'm guessing you've already tried those as well. Sigh.. I was looking forward to playing this game, but ultimately decided to wait out and see if the devs could come up with fixes for this buggy release

 

I was looking forward to it too... too bad that so far it's been a steaming pile.

for those interested, this is the kind of result I get with the 179.14 (and similar) drivers. I just discovered that the 179.14 is acting the same as the others... I thought it worked, but apparently not.

As you can see, there's not a lot to work with....



180.48 glitches, some kinda static-y effect, and all of the rest of the 180.xx series that I've tried BSOD's

 

wow, looks bad. 181.00 & 181.10?

 

You didn't by any chance try to install the patch for GTA IV, did you?

 

I had the same problem you obviously have on the screenshot!
Download Rivatuner if necessary - start it and in the Main Tab at the Driver Settings choose : "Reset all driver settings to their default value". Its the last Icon in the list under driver settings.
That worked for me. (after I tried several drivers).
I read that it helped many people on different machines, with different drivers and hardware.
(I've 180.70 installed)

 

This game intends to be worst f..ked up port form consoles to PC ever. Probably due to christmas comming they released it ad hoc just to earn few more $ totally unstable and not optimized. Fail rockstar, fail.

 

i second. mind you, NfS U could give it a run for it's money as worst port.

 

thats need for speed underground? when i got it i actually didnt see how bad it is. it ran perfectly well and it was a pretty good game.

 

Undercover, came out a few weeks ago. heavily CPU dependent, lacklustre graphics, dumb & repetitive gameplay. waste of time.

 

Basically most notebook out there + GTA IV = Fail lol. Although yours are worse but the other is no better.

 

imho it's more like "all PCs out there + GTA IV = Fail"...

 

Exactly, I`m already tired of listening my friends moaning on GTA IV and they have desktops far more powerful than my M17 with Radeons 4870 x2 or GF 280GTX, 4 GB RAM and quad cores or heavily OC`ed 2 cores...

This is just crappy port for PC, not only for laps.

 

i was actually looking forward to getting the game and then i saw all the reviews were pretty bad so i guess it turned out terrible. Luckily i didnt buy it >>

 

yup. lucky i didn't buy it...

i'm just hoping Mirror's Edge will turn out better

 

I wanna play Mirrors Edge!

 

so do i - reviews have been ho-hum, but i'm dead set on trying it.

 

reviews are just "professional" opinions.. and my opinion counts more than someone elses. So, I'm gonna give it a whirl

 

I wasn't going to buy Mirror's Edge, but now that it's a button press away on Steam, I'll bite eventually.

On topic, have you tried Dox's 180.84 yet or 179.28?

 

tried Dox' 180.84 (both versions), considering trying 179.28 tonight or tomorrow. looks promising in benchmarks.

 

Guess What I actually bought GTA4 but am waiting for everything to be fixed before I install cant wait to start modding.

 

hehe you can start modding as soon as you get it running

 

Actually am waiting for Fedex to deliver it gets here on the 24

 

What is up with these GTA IV = FAIL threads? I have never had a problem with it. In fact, with the patch I am able to run Medium textures and still get ~30fps outdoors and 60fps indoors.

If your hardware can't run the game at a satisfactory framerate, it's not a failure on Rockstar's part. And that's exactly the problem. Because if the game was just garbage, it wouldn't run on any computer.

 

you paid 3000$ for a high-end gaming laptop and are happy with 30fps and medium textures? me personally, i'd expect nothing less than 30fps at (close to) maxed out settings from almost every game.

 

Seriously. The game doesn't even look good enough for me to tolerate the low performance. "All the calculations and stuff going on in the city blah blah yadda yadda." I only care about what's happening around my character, and it looks bad.

 

Funny, I wasn't aware that we knew each other. I paid $1,974 for my M17. And yes, 30fps on a game that requires almost 2GB of VRAM to run at max settings is fine with me.

This has nothing to do with how much I paid or what framerate I'm happy with. I mentioned what my hardware was capable of, and that's it. Don't make this personal.

 

wow, I'm almost afraid to post back here.... heh.

I did the update, once upon a time, and when it fubar'd the first time, I completely uninstalled and reinstalled the game... fixed it up the same way I did the first time to get it working, and since then, it's been a complete fail.

prior to the patch, the game ran choppy and mediocre... even at low resolutions.

 

@Mystik:

If your system is the one in your Sig, then you would have significant problems with GTA IV. If I'm not mistaken, the 8700M GT is a 512MB card, but the 128 bit bus kills it's true capability. Again, this would be a hardware issue.

 

this explains why it played fine until I tried to patch it?

seriously now.

it was a little slow.... but it at least RAN and I could see SOLID OBJECTS.

 

TurbodTalon: well, when game has significantly worse gfx than i.e. Crysis I expect it`ll have less reqiurements. Logical. Not to mention that is there antialiasing option in GTA 4?

 

no specific options for it.... though I think it gets enabled when the rendering "quality" is increased.

 

All I am going to say is that the game ran fine for me pre-patch, and even better post-patch. If the game was garbage, it would perform poorly on ALL computers, not just some.

 

what settings are you running it at?

 

Statistics
Average FPS: 30.99
Duration: 37.65 sec
CPU Usage: 92%
System memory usage: 56%
Video memory usage: 100%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1920 x 1200 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: Medium
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 14
Detail Distance: 40

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Ultimate
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870
Video Driver version: 7.14.10.630
Audio Adapter: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9100 @ 3.06GHz

 

you pay 3000 bucks for a gaming PC and are happy with "medium" textures?

 

This is the 2nd time you've brought up the fictional price of my laptop. Why? This is a technical discussion about GTA IV.

The setup in your sig is exactly $350 more than I paid for my M17, and what are you pulling, maybe 10K 3DMarks? You have a single GPU, and a low-res LCD...shall we put this to rest? Seriously. You, too, own an Alienware.

The fact of the matter is that GTA IV is what it is. None of us in this forum can change that.

Could you make an attempt at bringing something factual to the table?

 

fact: GTA IV performs poorly on PCs, even high-end ones such as yours (or mine, i suspect, haven't given it a try yet).

fact: i can run games like Far Cry 2 at "very high" settings with playable framerates (25-40fps).

question: why then can you (with a more powerful machine) run a game such as GTA IV (which, judging by screenshots, doesn't look half as good as the aforementioned FC2) at only "medium" setting?

in my personal opinion, this indicates that GTA IV is badly coded/optimised for PC.

 

Sigh...dude, I never said it wasn't poorly coded. I said I could run it at Medium settings on my current setup.

This was about the point when you veered into left field and started talking trash about my machine, my mediocrity for seeing 30fps and medium textures as acceptable, and assuming I paid $3,000 for my laptop.

Seeing as how you've never played the PC version, why are you so confrontational?

Good day.

 

trash talking? i'm not trash talking your machine... heck, yours is better than mine, no denying that. i don't think i ever said one bad word about your laptop, except maybe that GTA IV has problems with ATI cards, which is well-known by now AFAIK.

your mediocrity? i simply cannot see how you can consider 30fps @ medium settings "running fine". i would expect more from a high-end laptop (we'll lose the "3000$" figure, since you're so upset about it ). but hey, that's your call. and of course, it's not your laptop's fault, it's the game's fault.

confrontational? sure. or do you just wanna let this happen? me personally, i think the gaming community should be in outrage over games like this. they're slowly whittling away at the status and importance of the PC fraction of gamers in regards to marketing and development expenses. two games within a short period of time (GTA IV and NfS Undercover) have shown the signs of bad porting from console to PC, and i fear that if we, the PC gamers, do not protest against this, this will become the norm rather than the exception, something i'm sure we all don't want.

 

lower lip napkins for the both of you!!!

 

Ok guys let's cool down in here . . . thank you.

 

Fair enough. I heard there was already a refund type thing going on for GTA IV.

 

yep, Steam (Valve's online distribution service) is, in some case, paying out refunds for GTA IV - a first for them IIRC.

 

I`m not surprised, if you pay for good hardware that can manage all present games with good or very good performacne you`re pissed off when you pay for game that looks average/good and works slowly than almost every else.

 

interesting. I hope you did the reset driver thing on Rivatuner.
And I suggest you that you use the GTA 4 optimized driver (180.48) for better chance to fix your problem. Because any other driver (so far) will decrease the performance of GTA 4.
I have a m15x with 9800m gt, cpu core 2 duo 2.5ghz playing GTA 4 with decent FPS around 20 to 30 with no glitches. I think it's something else that is messing you up.

And try to use driver cleaner from guru3d before reinstalling ANY new driver.
I also recommend using the "disk" method to install driver for better compatibility. (and you don't need driver cleaner for that)

 

the important point is the settings you're getting those scores at.

 

QUOTE=pencilcheck;4321349]interesting. I hope you did the reset driver thing on Rivatuner.[/QUOTE]

I couldn't find it.

I reset all my nVidia driver settings to default using the program, and I'd rather not use driver cleaner... just seems barbaric. I go into the programs list and hit "uninstall"... does the trick.

I currently have 179.14 installed, I'm going to see if the reset fixed the problem, if so, I'll move to 180.48 and see if it's any better.

 

You would be surprised at how much crap is left behind after the driver 'claims' to have been uninstalled. It's like painting over your old paintjob without sanding/primer/pulling out dents.

 

probably all stuff that is of no consequence.