GTA IV Problems!

Hi guys! Im freaking out because I just started up GTA IV and it barely renders on low settings! What am I doing wrong?! Please help!

 

Renders? Do you mean you get a bad FPS?

Well then you're screwed. GTAIV is a brilliant game ruined with crap coding. The M11X won't handle it. Unless you heavily tweak GTAIV, which is nearly impossible.

You're doing nothing wrong.

 

I'm assuming you have a switchable graphics? (nvidia optimus). Try going into the nvidia control panel and setting the 540m to run on GTAIV. If not, make sure your laptop is on performance mode and not in power save mode. If not, try updating your NVIDIA drivers.

 

Is there stealth mode on the M11x? If so check and see if it is on...

 

If it has Optimus, then the first step is to check that it is the 540m working with GTA IV.

 

GTA IV is a very CPU-heavy game. A 1.5GHz quad-core probably just doesn't cut it.

 

yup...that's how it starts....basically if i read this correctly the Intel GPU is active and not the NVGPU.....and since Optimus has no hard-switch/single mux....you cant disable the intel GPU.....

maate its the optimus...believe me, i have tried making it work from every aspect (Rockstar even has the thread open regarding optimus and GTA4)

-first whitelisting the app is an idea in the NV control panel
-make sure you are in high perf. mode for the laptop
-there is a driver that the NV tech on NVIDIA forums forwarded to some guys here and it seemed to have solved some of their problems
-there is a new ?beta/whql that supports NVIDIA tech on the M17's R3...give them a shot (if ur GPU is on the list)

if all else fails (which happened to me) send it in.... and get yourself an ATI (sure the drivers are annoying) but man the GPU at least turns off for good, and you always know which GPU is active...the switching might be unsightly but it sure is peace of mind

 

OP you should also try playing it with 1.0.4.0 patch. It's the most optimized patch for GTA4 there is.
G0DL1K3 3L1T3 I think his rig should handle it. Look at my config, I run GTA4 like on high settings, using the above mentioned patch of course.

 

I've tried all of these and read a bunch of different threads and even nVidia has been notified of this problem but they seem to be doing nothing about it. This "amazing Optimus Technology" is just a piece of crap.

 

Well now I put it on "High Performance" in AlienFusion. And i'm clean installing a new driver. I don't know, I hope it works.

 

I've whitelisted GTA to use the nVidia but it still doesnt work. I installed a new GTA patch and now i get the error message " RGSC.exe Cant start!RGSC (rockstar games social club) must be present amd running for the game to run!" Ive tried logging into social club but it still doesnt work. Now I have 2 problems, Optimus wont switch to the GT540m AND GTA wont start!

 

Look, GTA IV isin't that easy to install. It is a bit noob proof. I'm asuming you don't have priated the game. Uninstall everything. Then reboot, install GTA IV again, then the newest patch because unless you won't bee able to play online. then before starting the game also download Games for windows live. Sure it goes along with the install but that is the old version. Then go to install location program files/rockstar game/GTA IV and rightclick on LaunchGTAIV and select run as admin. This should fix GTA IV, but about optimus, I have no clue. BTW, what FPS are you getting in GTA IV? not playable at all?

 

Its like playable, but like right as I get off the boat, the car is floating on nothingness. Thats what i meant when I said "it doesn't render".

 

Really? I have seen many people on the M11X forum side complaining about the game and how it runs like junk.

At the OP: If it doesn't actually render, you might have these problems:

1.You have a pirated game which the person removed some things for downing file size.

2.You are getting artifacts.

3.DirectX errors.

 

First of all, his GPU is far too weak. For a laptop, it is good, but compared to even a low range desktop GPU, it is weak. My returned laptop with a far superior 6970m barely could run this game. It pulled 35-45 FPS on a mix of settings and draw distance low.

Now even if his GPU could run it, his CPU couldn't. 1.5 Ghz.....nope.

Sorry, not ragging on anyone's laptop's, but seem people seem to think any PC can run anything.

 

I have to agree with you [email protected]. The GPU isn't the problem, it's CPU .

 

It's not about the hardware AT ALL.

Rockstar are lazy people who don't know how to program and port. The coding is horrible, much like Black Ops.

 

What patch and what settings are you using? You might have the settings too high because gta iv will see that you have all that VRAM and default to settings that are too demanding for the gt 540m.

 

And how many games have you programmed and/or ported, just out of curiosity?

The game is coded just fine. It's demanding because it's an enormous game and it needs good hardware to back it up.

 

Your avatar is telling everything, on its own! Also as Mastershroom said, can you do better? No, so take your brain out of the fridge and think over it again. And yes, it is his hardware. My post above was about because he said he was unable to start the game.

I'm actually REPing you up for this, couldn't say it better myself.

 

He probably can't code a better game, but nobody's paying him to, so he doesn't have to.

GTA IV is poorly optimized, it's a fact. Look at some framerate benchmarks for different GPUs/CPUs. You get almost no performance boost from a better GPU. Console ports FTW.

 

What is poorly optimized?

It is a huge city and a lot of stuff is going on without you, as palyer even knowing it. I'm loving this game, and just park your car side of a sidewalk and just listen to the life in background.. OP have a quad core running at 1.5ghz. I'm getting about 30-40fps at medium @ 720p with a dualcore @ 3.06ghz and 130M. It is all about the CPU that needs to keep tracking of every single personality on the street.

 

gta Iv is not poorly coded at all. i dont understand your guys reasoning.

million things going on at once. what do you expect

btw my 2ghz amd quad core and mobility 5650 run the game maxed with draw distance turned all the way down FTW.

awesome game and awesome performance with my crappy setup.

gta IV ftw

 

Pretty weird. I'm guessing the OP has an m11x R3. I have an m11x R2 and GTA IV runs fine.

 

And my point is that you would get almost zero performance increase with a quad-core and a GPU that isn't hot trash.

Fun game, badly optimized.

 

No actually. I got it to run and i'm doing High settings on everything and its working fine, no lag...

 

You kidding? Look up some some GTA 4 benchmarks cpu and gpu benchmarks.

GTA4 is one of the few games that do take advantage of a quad core. As to your GPU comment, well people have been reporting getting better framerates with better GPUs... Dunno how you can say getting a better GPU wouldn't improve framerates.

Only the developer knows how optimized it is, you can't just guess and say it's not optimized without knowing what's running under the hood in the game code.

 

I guess he is kidding. He can't be serious.

 

Blind Rockstar fanboyism?

It's a fun game, but it doesn't take proper advantage of increases in hardware.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Look at the framerate on the 130M.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Now look at the framerates on the 485M, a chip that was the top of the line until a month or two ago. Not much of a difference. Then take a look at the difference between levels of detail. Almost nothing.

Like I said, fun, but poorly optimized. Unless you consider crappy console ports to be optimal. The PC versions of the GTA series have all been crappy console ports, so I'm not sure why you guys are getting so indignant.

 

the 130m got 30 fps on low settings and the 485m got 60 fps on high settings... that sounds like a nice increase to me. when is the last time you played gta iv? I know when it first came out it was a mess.

 

You made an outrageous statement, got disagreed with, changed your story to a more believable (though sill flawed) one, and then call me a fanboy?

I didn't even saying the game was well optimized, I was just correcting you on something you said that was flat out wrong. Clearly, if I don't agree with your blind Rockstar bashing, I must be a fanboy.

 

It's not a nice increase when you consider that the 130 is about as terrible as video cards get and other games from 2008 saw 200+ FPS increases between the two cards.

 

It's an absolutely true statement. It's poorly optimized, just like most Rockstar PC games. Again, it's still a great game, but the PC version is a bad port.

Don't get so mad, bro.

 

I'm not mad, just slightly annoyed that people would willingly go to an internet forum and yet refuse to read.

Again, I never said whether GTA4 was well optimized or not. Doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to realize that's not what I was referring to. Take a look at what I posted again. 3rd times a charm?

 

'Poorly optimized' seems to be a phrase that is easily thrown out when things don't work as we expect. I have no experience to judge if a game is optimized or not, but I'm sure back in 2004 Half Life 2 would've been 'poorly optimized'.

But back to the GTA IV issues and the well-known facts:
+ Since it was released for PCs (end of 2008) it was well known that GTA IV requires a quad core to run properly. The only other way to circumvent it was to have a very powerful dual core (3.0 GHz and above, not below, which for that time it implied that only high-end laptops could run it properly).
+ In regards to the GPU: it was also well-known that GTA IV isn't very GPU-intensive since it's (oh surprises!!) a console port.

Thus to the OP: it is the CPU.

 

Congratulations on being right about the quad core, I guess that's not surprising since it's developed for multithreaded console processors. Here's a cookie.

It's still a bad console port.

 

Single-core just isn't the standard for PC's anymore, and dual-core is being phased out. Developing a game to take advantage of quad cores is NOT bad developing/porting. On top of that, GTA IV is a truly enormous game in terms of content (hundreds of people and cars and objects to process and keep track of in real-time in a huge city), and I am not at all surprised or disappointed that it requires a good quad-core CPU to run smoothly.

 

I'm not saying the quadcore thing is bad porting. The GPU thing is.

 

what are you talking about?

my old hd2600 ran it all low. now my new 5650 runs it all high

edit both have 2ghz cpus

 

I mean what I said. Look at the frame rate on a top of the line card compared to a garbage card. Not that big a difference. Obviously it's going to run better on a new GPU as opposed to a 4 year old one, but the return you get from going from a crap GPU to a good one is all whacked out.

 

You're confussed. If the frames are not limited in the GPU (vsync or any other method), then the GPU will provide the maximum FPS available.

The proof you claim (low GPU vs high GPU shows little difference) is a symptom that the game is CPU-bounded (CPU is the bottleneck). Therefore better CPU=better FPS until the GPU becomes the bottleneck. And that is all.

 

exactly right. but what hes saying is their is a gpu problem aswell.

 

How do you know that? All proof are the quotes of different GPUs and similar framerates: that's a sign of cpu-bounding.

 

I play GTA IV on my desktop with a 4.0GHz quad-core, and a relatively old, mediocre GTS 250 1GB graphics card. It runs just fine for me on that setup, but would hardly run at all on my old 3.0GHz dual-core, so I agree that it's definitely more CPU-intensive. That doesn't make it a bad port, that just means it relies more on a good CPU than graphics card.

 

It still does need a good GPU with the latest patches and the shadows turned up to very high.

 

Dude, seriously. GTA IV depends more on the CPU then GPU. It is clear that you don't know what you are talking about.

PS: I have not seen thorugh all the pages I missed. Just between you and me.

 

I really could not care less about continuing this discussion beyond this post, but there is virtually no performance scaling at all. The only thing that you can possibly do that makes any kind of difference is going from a dual core to a quad core.

 

There seems to be some strangeness going on with GTA IV. Just recently started playing it, and with everything maxed out at 1080p I get anywhere from 30-45 fps, which is no doubt playable. I've come across forums with people that report better or equal framerates to mine with lesser hardware. Before patching fps would range anywhere from about 5-50. Funny thing is, changing any of the graphical settings (except for night shadows) has hardly any effect on framerate, and cpu usage tops out at 42% (according to the report from the in-game benchmark). The benchmark strangely manages to maintain a constant 55-60 fps throughout, which makes it seem pretty useless since a benchmark should give a close idea of how the game will run during actual gameplay. I believe that this game would run smoother if it had just been optimized a bit more. The graphics are pretty terrible as well. Clipping, jaggies everywhere w/o AA, and even with full view distance objects pop up out of nowhere. Using version 1.07 btw, which I believe is the latest patch.

 

My current laptop that has the GTX485M (specs in sig) can play GTA IV with all sliders at 100%, everything set to high at 1920 x 1080 resolution and hit 45-55 fps so I wonder if that laptop you returned did not have a good enough CPU. Draw distance is more CPU intensive.

 

@ TheGreatAnonymous

The CPU usage shown in the GTA IV benchmark is often much higher than we think because it sees Hyperthreading as extra Cores and calculates percentages based on this.

If you disable Hyperthreading you will often see CPU usage reported as almost double the previous figure. That 42% you see is more near 85-90%+. HT offers absolutely no performance increase in GTA IV though.