Sluggish after GTA IV

I'm having a little problem here with my 5793.

I'm playing GTA IV with 1600 x 1200, and mostly medium settings, the game runs fairly well and only slows down in places with too much going on, such as when I've got the camera position with a knocked-over hydrant in the foreground, with the fountain of water overpowering the frame.

When I shut the game off and return to Windows, I find everything running sluggish, from browser (Firefox) to IM clients (even Gtalk, a very very light software) and whatnot. Task Manager reports 25% RAM usage and 10% or less CPU usage throughout.

Any reasoning behind this slowdown?

 

you can increase the pagefile size, as well as make sure your HDD is defragmented.

I recommend Diskeeper Lite (its free)... I use it for XP, for Vista I use Diskeeper or PerferctDisk

 

Thanks for the swift reply Gohpn.

I used Diskeeper until the license expired, I'm using Defraggler now. All my partitions are defragmented. Think I ought to buy myself a license? I really appreciated the constant defragmenting.

Paging file's about 4.5GB, figured that ought to be sufficient. I really don't know why this is happening, I've played all sorts of stuff like Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, UT 3, Mass Effect, The Witcher and others at 1920 x 1200 with mostly maxed out settings and I never had an overall system slowdown after hours of any of them.

 

pagefile should be around:
min = your physical amount of memory
max = your amount of memory times 2

so for you...
min = 4GB
max = 8GB

 

no need to buy Diskeeper, when the Lite version is 100% free and up-to-date.

funny enough its included in Intel Desktop Utilities.

both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the up-to-date Diskeeper Lite.

 

hm didnt know gta was such an intensive game... whats holding it back, is it the cpu or gpu

 

GTAIV is probably the latest game that will force a system to its limit.

recommends a high-end videocard and a quad-core CPU for best performance.

 

I think its more due to the fact that GTA4, from what I heard, is an unoptimized piece of crap.

What is sadder than that though is the fact that people are buying quad core processors, expensive as they are, just to play it.

 

whats sad is that developers dont care enough to release optimized code, they are just being greedy now.

 

I usually have the pagefile disabled. But lately I have put it to 16MB and maximum to 2 GB. And it never went to more than 16MB in the past 2 months .

 

Exactly everybody heard it's unoptimized because everybody think's that a game running at low fps is unoptimized. But damn GTA4 has a million thing moving including people running away from you, light, people buying hot-dog .... I don't think there is another game with so much detail and activity so we can't really compare. I've seen people comparing mirror's edge running fine on there PC compared to GTA4 com'on

 

Sp3ctrum, have you played Assassin's Creed? You have just as much happening, there are a whole bunch of people walking, running, fighting, drinking, heralding, and being molested by guards, along with patrolling guards, templars and shoppers, along with the distinct cries of each. Buildings are rendered with grab-able surfaces and beautifully detailed textures, not to mention your flags and other random elements (flags) surrounded by their 'programming code' auras. All that bustle, and the game runs smooth as velvet upon silk.

 

U do know that GTA IV can't crossfire/SLI properly right?
I second the opinion that GTA IV is unfinished unoptimized crap.

 

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I have the same problem with Battlefield 2.

 

Gophn, how do you increase the pagefile size?

 

Yes I have played assassin's creed but I'm not sure if I agree in term of activity, also I don't really remember how nice assassin's creed texture were but I think that Gta4 has much more texture to loadsince there is always a multitude of different building. In assassin's creed the building are shorter and there is a lot of building that look alike. Plus I think there is almost zero light reflective surface in assasin's creed but gta has every car and I think it is CPU intensive

And you think that because it run at low fps, you have no idea if there is a crazy amount of things to compute or that the texture, physic, movement are more advance than in other game or it really is unoptimized

I wasn't aware that it didn't supported SLI although let's be honest outside forum and lan party I haven't seen anybody with SLI because FPS gain is not worth the money in most people mind and Rokstar seem's to have put their egg in the quadcore basket which is much more widespread and is useful not only in game but also other application

I have no idea if I'm right or wrong but you just can't say a game is unoptimized because it has low FPS that's just a really bad argument

PS: I have been a huge fan of every GTA game from the ps2, pc and psp so my judgement is biased

 

Look at it this way, regardless of how high every building in Assassin's Creed is, you can dance around the walls of it with the hundreds of handholds and footholds and find fourteen different ways to get on top (remember that huge cathedral?) and find other crazy stuff on top.

You can't interact with the majority of GTA's buildings, perhaps just plop a helicopter on top of some of them. Fact is, hasn't this constant rendering been a part of past GTA games too? Why're they having issues now, they got the formula down with Vice City if not GTA 3 itself.

Look, I'm not saying GTA doesn't have an absolutely immense amount of detail and individual objects to compute, I'm merely trying to make the point here that no longer is GTA the only game that does this, a lot of other games have caught up to this style of play and they're doing it better than Rockstar, Rockstar with a plethora of other titles in the same vein.



Let me clarify. My main issue is not performance of the game itself, I'm fine with how it plays, up until I got my 5793 I was still sitting on a 2000 manufactured 733mhz P3 with 128mb ram. The problem I'm having is with how sluggish my system is acting after I turn the game off.

 

Sorry I have no idea about your issue it just bother me when ppl GTAIV based on pretty much nothing and you can't compare gta vice city and gta IV, car/building rendering and modelisation are two different word/graphic engine. Also while you can't really interact with GTA4 building they are not square and every edge is not just a texture it is modelized.

But your are right Unreal Engine make a beautiful job and have found the right setting to run very well on most gamer PC which GTAIV can't do

 

hmmm.. doesnt that sound familiar.... *cough* ..... Crysis

people were scrambling to get the latest videocard and still saw that they cant play it at max.... because Crysis is a poorly coded game

while GTAIV is better since it will noticeably run better with a multi-core CPU (which is cheaper to buy than a new high-end videocard) since it pre-renders/buffers the surroundings while in-game with the CPU cycles... and helps with the physics.

in your System Properties > Advanced tab > Performance Options > Advanced tab > (under Virtual Memory) hit the Change button.

 

meh, well its a game i wanted to play on my new 5797 but meh, didnt know the duo-->quad made such a difference.

oh well, i guess i have to wait and see what the 2.66 can do

 

Souroll you really shouldn't have too much trouble playing, very occasional slowdowns, mostly involving weather.

 

yes it's playable with my config it runed between 20 to 25fps but with rain and fog it droped to about 16 fps. Can't wait for my futur desktop to play it at a bit higher FPS

 

Sorry Gophn but you are just wrong here. Crysis could have had some minor optimization here and there but largely much of the problems is because it is the most graphically advanced game ever made thus far. Crytek isn't stupid, they know how to make engines. The problem is they are just pushing the envelope in terms of graphical tech and thus to run all their advanced engine tech you need a lot more horsepower than other games.

GTA IV is more of an example of a sloppy port. Crysis was built from the ground up for PC. It is just a game that should have been released 2 years after it was released. It was just too ambitious for its time.