gta 4 ..... unplayable... why ?

ok so i got gta 4 for the pc, so i could play it anywhere on my laptop.

Took forever to install , but once it had i took pleasure in giving it a whirl.

But after the intro video of nico on the boat the game is unplayable, when you start in the car it hardly moves, its like really really jumpy and i have no idea why.

trying to play on a gateway fx6860

1.8ghz core 2 duo
4gb ram
320gb hard drive
8800gts 512mbs

i didnt change any settings, its all left stock in the game and the pc.

I tried lowering the resolution and all the details and it still played like crap, whats up with it, i dont know what to do

 

Cpu, Cpu , Cpu

 

From what I understand is that GTA 4 required a lot of CPU processing power and Video Memory.

So you 1.8ghz and 8800GTs 512MB would have problem running them for sure.

I've seen a stock P-7805u with OC'ed GPU played this game smoothly.

 

well on the site it says that an ati 3870 would play it fine, and the 8800gts is better than it.

and the 9800 gts in the 7805u is only slightly better than my 8800gts, like slightly, thats what the benchmarks say

im ordering the t9300 at the end of the month, will this make it run better

 

Yep, the T9300 would definately improve the performance. But quad-core is recommended for this game.

I've seen somewhere on the internet that GTA 4 used up almost 1 GB of the video ram of the 9800gts, so I guess that your 512mb won't be enough to run it that well.

 

have u tried to decrease some of the settings like AA, screen resolution,ect....

 

that's positive, it's 700MHz more which is huge gain.

 

play it on highest res with lowest settings this way your gpu is bottle neck instead of cpu

 

i lowered the screen res, the details, and distances and stuff all to very low, and it still runs like crap

 

You can't compare mobile cards to Desktop Cards first of all. An 8800M GTS is about an 8600GT Desktop version and a half.

Now, it's probably your CPU. Although, make sure you're not running a virus scan while trying to play. This could be bottlenecking the cpu.

 

Your horribly cpu bound, nothing you can do to fix it but lower the number of people/cars to the lowest, overclock your cpu and hope for the best.

This games recommended specs include a quad core cpu, you not only have only 2 cores, you have a slow dual core cpu.

your graphics settings and resolution are not going to change the cpu load to be any lighter, its the AI and physics and things in the game that are using the cpu.