GTA 4 disappointed in performance...

Hi, so i got GTA IV for christmas and am extremely annoyed at performance on my machine, i get the god damn stuttering a few minutes into every god damn game i play, it would be an extremely fun game if you didn't have to look down all the time to get good framerates, funny how i got 27 in the benchmark on mostly medium settings, 30 everything, and with the newest patch, but in game i get 10-15... but not playable, it stutters like hell. I used the commandline tweak to allow more allocated system RAM to the VRAM, but same crap, i set settings all to high and still the same performance, i set them all to lowest, barely noticeable increase in FPS... is there anything i can do? I overclocked my 570M and i'm using 195.55 Quadro drivers, i don't understand, Dirt 2 played with 20-30 FPS with just stock GPU clocks, 1360x900 res, and all high some ultra high... I really am disappointed since i was really planning to have some fun with this game. Please, can someone give me some hope that i can run this game at least a little more smoothly? I am downright pissed off at this... I was sure i was going to get smooth FPS especially with the newest patch, and i do in the benchmark, 27 FPS, this is a real downer.

 

GTA IV likes quad core CPUs. If changing the settings from highest to lowest produces no difference in frame rate, chances are you are CPU bound. That said, your GPU is also pretty old so it's hard to say what exactly is bottlenecking you. That laptop is getting rather long in the tooth and it shows (particularly when playing poorly optimized or otherwise resource hungry games).

 

I have a beast of a PC, the first thing I bought when I build it was GTA4, and even with everything low a fraps of 60 it still is choppy, due to its coding bug, I spend hours trying to figure it out. I got sick of trying, and literally threw it in the garbage can.

 

It's just that i saw it played smoothly on 8600M GT's with T7500's... i really am disappointed with it, even at highest settings GTA 4 does not look that great... for how it looks and how much power it takes, it's a waste of time.

 

Looking at your specs I think your ram might be holding you back. I dunno, the system I have see my specs below, it only slow down in the cutscenes but its not a big drop. It run like at 20fps or so but I left the graphics at whatever the default settings was and it was on high/med. I really don't know too much about your system if what you have is better than mine.

 

Funny, ran pretty good on my Q6600 and 8600 GTS. Only thing that bothered me was the fact that the voice and movements were only a tad out of sync in cutscenes, apart from that it was good, on a mixture of medium and high.

As for the OP, I think your CPU isn't enough. My P8400, which is a tad worse, only gets like 12FPS when it's raining, and 15FPS on a good day.

 

The thing is though why am i getting such horrible FPS when a T400 with a 3650 and a 2.53 P8700 or something play GTA 4 as smooth as it was in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5ml7gpj_P8

 

Idk about those specs for gta4. Buy a ps3 and play it. Will cost a lot less than building a pc just for that game.

 

Um well I think you can run it if you use his settings....848x480. Your laptop does not meet the minimum requirements so not sure what you were expecting.

 

id try older drivers and as the new geforce drivers have not been great (not sure about quadro). you could even try geforce drivers as you should get slightly better performance than what you are getting.

 

Maybe because your laptop has a workstation graphic card instead of a gaming graphics card correct me if im wrong or has others said its your CPU that is the problem

 

Much like supreme commander and flight simulator x, this game is one of the ones that is really demanding on the cpu and supports (read requires) a quad core cpu to run well.

What is killing you is not the graphics its the AI & Physics that the cpu is running, you have a whole city of people and cars that are in real time having A0 processed, I do agree it is poorly optimized and could be better, but half the time this is the kind of crud you get out of a console port, its not re-optimized for the PC and they force you to get through it with good hardware.

Runs great on my laptop & desktop both use quad core cpu's but even still I can not max this game out takes too much video memory.

 

its both his CPU and GPU

 

Nah, his Quadro will perform much the same as an 8600M GT, as it is based off that core. The only difference is that one is more optimized for workstation applications such as CAD and Solidworks.

For OP: Have you tried the 180.84 drivers? They are GTA IV optimized apparently.

 

GTA IV is simply badly ported and poorly optimized.

Lower settings make the game more choppy for me... :S Eitherway, I've disabled the water resolution and water quality. It looks unrealistic either way to me when its on high.

Shadows look extremely awful on low settings too.

 

I ran it at ~20 fps, in 1280x1024 on my external monitor, everything on medium. It ran pretty decent i'd say, you can see my specs in the sig, and i got stock clocks. Idk maybe your RAMs are a bit to low, maybe adding 1gb more would help?

 

Please stay on-topic in this thread - I had to delete a few posts. Thanks.

 

RAM is far too low, I find myself going over 2gb usage on many games. As others have said GTA IV loves quad cores, but even the system in my sig cannot max this game, it was very poorly ported. Lower the settings, and get some more RAM.

 

oh yes, definitely get more ram. gta4 would suck up every mb of it.

 

Hmmm, just so happens i figured out i don't have enough RAM to share some with the GPU, i only have the 256MB card, so i had about 230MB to work with... but i was displeased with this so right away i used the commandline "-availablevidmem 2.0", but the command sucked too much out of the game RAM, so the stuttering must have been when the RAM is hustling to shuffle between being textures and game RAM, since everytime i moved to another part of the city it would literally stop and i would get 1 FPS (FRAPS), but now it's very smooth, i get 25-40 FPS with latest patch, now i can run it slightly over the "limit" using 330MB over the on... approaching medium settings, but i'm still pretty unhappy with how graphics look, trees have this weird fine pixelation, and everything in the distance looks like crap, also getting random grey boxes and textures that haven't been rendered in time, i will now have a reason to get a 4GB DIMM, so that i'll have 5 GB RAM when i'm done.

 

Did you try running it with direct x 9 to get better performances?

 

GTA 4 doesn't support DX10 so you can't play it in anything but DX9... The problem is his card is only 256 MB and not enough RAM. I believe 256 MB GPUs are below the requirements anyway.

 

No...since mine is roughly equivalent to a desktop 7900GS, and it's just memory limited, i need more RAM.

 

how the heck did you come to the conclusion that your gpu is equal to a 7900gs desktop card? Doesn't matter how much ram you add, it will not help. Just think about it for a second....your gpu uses gddr3 ram and you think adding ddr2 667 ram will make it run better?

 

My 256MB 8600 GTS begs to differ.

Anyway, you can actually go over the limit safely. I'm using 311MB when my card's only 256MB. Never had a problem.

 

for gta 4, yes.

 

Overclock more. Overclock both the GPU and CPU as much as you can.

 

+1
Overclock the sh*t out of it, and add some RAM. I bet you'll see a very noticeable gain.

 

Thats about all you can do, is overclock, that thing is no where near a desktop 7900GS. The RAM will help at appropriate settings, but your system is limited in reagrds to this game. It was just a poor port.

 

My laptop processor isn't that good, but I'm able to run GTA IV at 30+ fps mostly all the time, with auto-configured graphics settings (most on high, with lowish draw distance). It does help to use the ASUS turbo boost thing, though, so I'm sure actually ocing would do a lot of good.

 

To me, the one game better suited for consoles.

 

I used to think exactly the same until I tried playing it on my gaming laptop. With the PC, not only do you get better performance than the console, you get higher resolution, more customisation, Mods that add replayability and new features and graphics. As an example, my Xbox 360 appears to run this game smoothly but in reality it plays it at 20 fps with slow downs and at a low resolution with low settings. My gaming laptop plays this game at high resolution, high settings at over 40 fps with very few slow downs.

Of course you need a high end PC or laptop to play this but once you have that, you will never look back. My console is collecting dust now.

 

Well, GTA4 lags a little on PS3 too.
Dont even think its running 1280x720p native resolution.
(Bet it was ported from Xbox 360) xD

Best advice is to just turn everything to lowest possible and try enjoying the game even if it looks like crap.

 

What a cell processor can't handle it

Lol

 

I doubt the problem lies with the cell procesor (6 cores of 3 ghz?), don't forget the card in the ps3 is an nvidia 7 series (7900 or something).

 

GTA 4 is the one game that demands all laptops can offer. With a QX9300, 4GB RAM, and GTX 280M, my experience was more than enjoyable, rightfully so, better than the 360/PS3. It still ran my Sager to the ground though, lol, it's worse than Crysis because the quad core is mandatory. But a $2000 PC for that sole purpose isn't economical. If you've been wanting to play GTA 4, get a 360, it's only $200, and it really is worth it.

The Cell isn't a true multi-core processor. It has a single core and 6 working SPE's (one more reserved for the OS). I actually plan to get a PS3 to make up for selling my Sager. FFXIII, GoW 3, and GT5 are right around the corner, plus KZ2, MGS4, Uncharted, Resistance, and others make it all worth it. Built-in Wifi, Bluetooth, and Blu-Ray too, all for $300.

 

I agree. I also always look if something is cost-efficient. Paying 2k for a laptop every year just to be able to play the newest games is ridiculous.

 

Don't forget that GTA4 is also extremely badly optimized as a PC port, which is a huge part of the problem.

 

Wel rockstar shot itself in the foot by making a bad port.

 

Why would you even need to get a new laptop every year?

Some people have had a laptop with the older 8800M GPU for a few years and they still play recent games very well. My current laptop with the QX9300 and GTX260M will last me a lot longer than just another year and rivals recent core i7 ones. I agree that the cheapest way to play GTA IV would be to buy a console but you also have the option of external GPU's (Vidock 2), cheaper desktops etc. Bare in mind that even the console laggs with this one though.

 

Overclocking a T61p in order to play a game at less crappier settings is not very good advice. The simple fact is that the computer cannot handle the game, even with OCing (which has its drawbacks) and a RAM upgrade.

You're left with only a few options; either buy a console as someone earlier suggested, or build a desktop that will run everything under the sun for a relatively cheap price. High-end gaming on most laptops is not practical.

 

GTA IV with T7700, Quadro FX 570M and 2GB RAM ? What do you expect ?

EDIT: The PC version has better grapichs and more options for traffic, view distance etc. Just so you know...

 

Update: guys i'm actually starting to be pretty pleased with performance, it just turned out i have too little RAM and that my GPU is the 256MB version, it was stuttering because i was sharing too much of the 2GB RAM i have with the GPU, so it was swapping between being GPU RAM, and game RAM, which was making it extremely stuttery, and i know now why i got 27FPS in the benchmark with most things set to medium but got 1-15FPS in real gameplay.. and only when new textures had to be developed, now i can play it with 30-40 on low texture settings because i changed the commandline memory allocation to 1 rather than 2.

 

lol... my bottleneck IS NOT the CPU or GPU... it is in fact RAM... so i'm going to get a 4GB DIMM.