Rockstar seem to be listening...

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=380088&st=0

So no mention of R* solving the lag that exists on mid to low spec machines like mine (Asus M70VM, 2.26ghz C2D P8400, nVidia 9600M GS 512MB, 4GB RAM) so that people can play the game in a decent resolution (between 1280x800 and 1440x900 would be nice) with reasonable settings and being able to get at least 25-30 fps (I get at best 25 fps max on quite low settings at 1024x640 (just above the R* console settings they have noted in their graphical settings description on their site)), even in those low settings though the game looks great and plays ok, just wish I could get slightly higher fps...

Still at least R* are listening and it appears they are actually releasing a patch...

 

Of course, if they didn't everyone would be furious and drive R* out of business.

 

So does that makes it the 2nd game who received the most backlash of 2008? With Spore being the first.

 

Well, seeing as how only one game can receive the "most" backlash...

Does seem to be a lot of hubbub, though. People sliming GTA4 on Amazon.com and all.

 

Of course they're listening.

The in-game hookers are making more money than they are.

 

i dont like this. i wish they'd released a proper game instead of releasing something that caused a big ruckus. i hope this doesn't signal to other game developers that the PC game market is too difficult to work with and have them move away from it.

 

R* really screwed up. They should have worked on it a lot more before releasing it.They better fix this game quick to gain back some of there lost reputation.

 

I just thought of a bigger question.

When they were testing the game, what in the world made them think the performance was good?

 

was wondering the same thing lol

 

I'd hazard a guess and say that they were running it on top spec machines and didn't give a hoot about the fact that performance is not a constant among the PC world...

 

i would agree

 

But even some people with top of the line rigs still have too deal with all the gameplay breaking bugs so what gives?

 

Right now I'm pretty sure their QA lab only had a single GTX280 and HD4870x2. That would explain why it supports crossfire and not SLI. Keep in mind that directX is pretty universal, if it runs using directX 9c, then every card with full DX9c hardware capabilities & SM3 is supported in most cases. The fact that they limit/allow settings based on how much video memory the OS displays means they didn't code this very well. People running vista showing over 1GB of shared memory on midrange cards are allowed to run max settings while people with ultra high end 512mb cards on XP can't even get past medium. This game really should have been delayed, OR, they should stop selling it, and fix it, then do a re-release if they think it's worth it. And for the reason, publicly announce that the game was a technical disaster.

 

Well it's no worse than an M$ product, windows especially, you have to tweak that to get it working as correctly as possible. GTA IV is no different in that respect because you can add the -norestriction command to the shortcut or in a commandline.txt file in the install directory to enable the ability to use full settings.

I expect to have to "tweak" game settings and nVidia settings each time I buy a new game as my rig is only a low/medium end rig, but I can understand why many people with top end rigs are complaining.

Odd thing is that on my rig I have the textures set to max and they don't impact on the fps, probably because that side of things is not handled by the CPU...

 

Actually it does not have so much with GPU to do. This game relies heavily on a fast Core2Duo or a Quad Core. HardOCP made benchmarks with oveclocked CPU´s. Just increasing the speed of the CPU by a 500 MHz yields more fps than overclocking the GPU.

So basically people with 2Ghz Core2Duo is screwed, even me with a 2.4GHz core2duo is struggling to run the game. Though my 3Ghz Core2Duo on my desktop runs the game pretty good. So the faster CPU you have the better the game runs.

 

so Magnus.. with your benchmarks of the laptop, you was running the CPU on stock? cool

 

My brother has that CPU and the game runs very smooth, so it must be your system.

I don't agree with these claims that only the most cutting edge hardware is running this game properly. I have a midrange 8800 GT (desktop) and a Q6600 CPU and the game runs like a dream (medium settings).

 

Notice the C2Q CPU... thats why everyone is crying. the CPU requirement

 

TBH I do not blame only Rockstar. I also blame Y-O-U. Consumers forced rockstar to release this game early as possible for PC. They had tremendous pressure on them to do so from consumers and now you all pay for what happens when you rush a product.

 

we dont want it anymore, let them withdraw all the copies back

 

lol. i think this is bull. while there is tremendous rushing from consumers the developer still has to decide when to release it. if the game wasnt ready, they shouldnt have released it and lied to thier customers by giving them a crapfest. the buyer didnt want just the game, they wanted a GOOD game.

 

try pushing blizzard see what happens.

 

As early as possible?!?!?!?!?!?
They already retarded the release and it cam out afterr lots of months after console release.. I do not agree with you, I only blame Rock°

 

Rockstar really screwed this up. The game was tested on a Intel x3100 and got only 3 FPS average with 320x240 res and all settings tweaked to the bare minimum.

 

This problem wouldn't exist if they worked on it like Valve worked on TF2.

 

The 8800 GT is not midrange.... And your desktop hardware is not representative of the majority of our notebooks configuration.

 

That's not an excuse. GTA:SA came out 2 years after it came out on console and nobody really said anything about it. Valve and Blizzard take forever to put out new games while and most people are grateful for that because in the end you get quality games so no, no amount of pressure justify the mess that we have right now.

 

Laptop gpu's are not officially supported and by todays standards a 8800gt is a mid range gpu along with radeons equivalent mid range 4830. Anything 8700m gt and below falls into the bare minimum specs for the game and thats with completely ignoring the cpu in laptops.

I also don't understand why people are hoping this patch will increase performance. It says nothing in it about improving performance. Thats left up to nvidia/radeon now to improve the drivers. They have acknowledged there are problems with 7 series nvidia gpu's, but again this is another fix from drivers. Other than sli support I can't see how else they will improve performance. They aren't going to go back and recode the game so people with low end laptops can play better.

 

I would agree, it's safe to say the desktop 8800 is not mid-range per se, but a mobile 8800 is definitely mid-range by todays standards. High-end are the newer series, and ultra-high end would be SLI setups of the newer series.

 

uhmm ihearram

If a 9800m gpu is just a die shrink of the 8800m cards then they are still the same card.

So if youre calling a 8800m midrange the a 9800m is midrange as well.

You should have mentioned this as well.

 

well the 9800 gtx desktop version seems to rip this up quite well(not full max but close)....so......

 

I believe I♥ram meant 8800M GS or something, not GTX.

 

Yeah but come on, my Asus M70VM is brand new, I wouldn't call the 9600M GS 512MB a bargain basement gpu, I'd level that description at Intel GMAs...

Then min specs for GTA IV are -

OS: Windows Vista - Service Pack 1 / XP - Service Pack 3
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz, AMD Athlon X2 64 2.4Ghz
Memory: 1.5GB, 16GB Free Hard Drive Space
Video Card: 256MB NVIDIA 7900 / 256MB ATI X1900

And my Asus M70VM (P8400 C2D 2.26ghz, nVidia 9600M GS 512MB, 4GB RAM, XP SP3) exceeds those specs does it not?

They should have done something with the game to ensure that people with C2D 2ghz+ mobile cpus can play the game comfortably in a reasonable resolution, I have to run it in 960x600 just to get a half decent framerate on average, and if/when AA is enabled I'll lose fps if I want to lessen the "jaggies".

I don't see why the hell we as consumers should be buying £1000+ worth of hardware every year or two just to play a game anywhere we want to (in the case of having a laptop).

At the current rate of gaming advance I believe you can't even future proof a laptop in terms of gaming.

I am sick of seeing things become the playground for the wealthy only, everything in the world these days seems to be heading that way. I guess I'll just go back to playing solitaire instead once I've completed GTA IV, at least I know my rig will run that and I won't have to spend more on hardware just to play it.

 

Hows your GTA IV playing coming along Raven?
You have an m860TU right?
Hows it looking for you now?

 

Er no I have an Asus M70VM with a nVidia 9600M GS 512MB gpu and a C2D P8400 2.26ghz cpu.

Anyhoo apart from some lag here and there the game is playable, but I would like more fps.

It's odd though, the game in places gives me 35 fps when driving (mostly down alleyways where there is no traffic) and yet in other places (again when driving around when there is no traffic) I get 17 fps.

Rain and night seem to be the worst, as people have pointed out in the GTA IV Performance thread. I get on average about 13 fps when it's raining.

Daytime (not sun up or sun down) seems to be the best time.

I'm quite enjoying the game actually, it looks good, aside from the lag it runs smoothly and I'm not really noticing any gameplay bugs if there are any, I haven't tried finding/flying a helicopter yet though and I think that may be a no-go due to the fps issues, but I see from looking through a PS3 walkthrough that there are a few helicopter based missions so it may be unavoidable...

The game in the settings I have it now needs some AA (I've dropped the res further to 960x600) but I can live with no AA if I get playable fps, once you get used to it the "jaggies" aren't too bad. I did try it in 800x600, I got 30+ fps, didn't look good though.

Laptopvideo2go have released the 180.84 driver with a modded inf now so I'm going to try those and see if I get any improvement, although I doubt I will as I believe my fps problems all stem from the CPU...

EDIT: Installed the 180.84 drivers, no noticeable in improvement in fps, fraps is still reporting the same fps as I had before the 180.84 drivers...

 

there is a performance gain going from the 8800m gts to the 9800m gts.
its not much but its there.

the point is that high end games are not directed at laptops. you can buy a very capable gpus nowadays cheaper than ever. i would argue that a q6600 oc to 3.0ghz on p965 chipset equiped with a decent+ gpu can run almost anything out there (desktop wise), not at 2560x1600 but who cares about those resolution besides the tri/quad sli/cf guys? (respect)

how old is that q6600 ? how old is that p965 ? just need decent amount of ram (which is absurdly cheap) and that new gpu.

yes we notebook owners would like to squeez the most out of our machines, but the fact is that even though it is labeled a gaming notebook by asus/AW/sager/... doesn't mean the gaming industry consider this tiny market segment when releasing new games.

all that said, i am intrigued to see how gta iv will perform on this aging notebook

 

Ohh okay sorry got mixed up lol
Thats not TO bad with your system, might be better with the patch soon too.

 

ravenmorpheus I'm sorry you feel games are developed for the wealthy and normally I would sympathize if this was a game only for pc, but it's not. As I already stated, the specs give for the bare minimum are for desktops and the two gpu's they provided are 256 bit bus. So again this puts your graphics card at the bottom of the barrel in the desktop world which the game was developed for.

 

@bwhxeon - if games are not developed for the wealthy, who are they developed for? Lets face it even a good desktop that would run the game would cost somewhere in the region of £500+ ($745+ US) here in the UK and then next year it'll need a new GPU, probably at a cost of £100+ ($159+ US), it's just too expensive for most people when they have a mortgage, utility bills, food, travel costs, etc. Certainly on my income it's too much. And laptops are even worse because you have to buy a whole new laptop each time you want to upgrade.

And why shouldn't games companies take into account that people may wish to game on their laptops? The laptop market is a growing market, even the computer manufacturers have started pushing their laptops more than their desktops.

It just seems to me that many games companies forget that they are selling a game to a mass market and that not everyone has a top end rig, either that or they just don't care. They really ought to make more provision for lower spec machines that exceed the minimum specs they provide, even if they are based on desktop minimum spec.

Are dekstop cpus comparable to laptop cpus? Because that's all that seems to be the problem with my laptop, I have tried textures on low and it makes no difference in the fps and lowering the draw distance and traffic and detail distance doesn't have much of an effect either, not one that's worth lowering them for anyway.

The only other thing I can think it could be are the basic shadows (I have the shadow density set to 0) which we can't adjust.

I own an Xbox 360 but I game more on my laptop and I didn't want to pay £50 for the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV because I want to game round my buddys house, and in the office when I am at work and there isn't a lot to be doing, without dragging my brick of 360 around.

 

Yeah brainer I can´t overclock my CPU So everything at stock. Also when I said I couldn´t run the game good on my laptop, well not as good as I want it to be. Also it depends on what your brother plays at what res.

Though on my desktop it runs really good and this not at Medium settings but at Highest and High on textures which your 8800GT can´t cope with due to 512Mb of VRAM right?

 

thanks for the reply

yes the 8800gt is coped with 512mb of Vram , but still it runs decently, but not as expected

as for people saying that games are targeted for desktops (high end games)

Many laptops could Play Crysis on high settings even on release day, i'm not saying those laptops should max GTA 4.. but its not fair for them to CRAWL on low settings right?..

 

Yes laptops today are way faster than what they used to be a few years ago. I mean there is laptops today that beats desktops out there, high end desktops. So this bull about laptops not aimed at gaming just makes me furious.

 

get your self a nice cold beer.

 

Where is that "Bring back the demo" thread?
I like to know what a game will feel like for me personally and what it would run like on my machine before I cough up $50 for every game...