The qx9300, m570etu, and gta IV

I've searched for this but didn't find anything. Out of curiosity, have people found that the mobile quad is actually producing better results in this game as everybody predicted? Or is this old news that I missed somewhere? People keep saying that a quad won't produce many in-game benefits with the exception of in GTA, but I haven't seen any results from people who have both.

 

The QX9300 does wonders for GTAIV. No stuttering or slowdowns whatsoever, even with 100 traffic density in a six star chase in Algonquin with storming rains at nighttime. There is a big difference when I last tested the game running all four cores at 2.93Ghz compared to running with two cores disabled.

 

For me there's no way it benefits enough to make the processor worth $900. Mobile quads are too ridiculously overpriced right now for them to be viable.

 

Trade your QX9300 for my X9100 ?

 

No way! But I would happily trade you my Pentium M 740 for your X9100. Or how about my 9800M GTX?

 

2.93GHz eh? Can you get it higher? Like 3.5GHz?
Be sure to post some screenshots

BTW you have a M570ETU, right?

 

Yes, Cookie. I have the M570ETU. Phoenix BIOS restricts me to 1.5x multiplier over the stock 2.53GHz. However, I have experimented with SetFSB parallel with multiplier overclock and touched around 3.3GHz by cranking the FSB to 300MHz before I got bored and deleted it; I'm not a big fan of FSB overclocking.

I'll dedicate the next few hours to getting some screenshots for you Cookie. When I last fired up the game, it was in 1.0.2.0 and I heard that the new 1.0.3.0 patch fixed a handful of bugs and performance optimizations.

 

Okay, here's my analysis of GTAIV on my setup.

Let's get the basics down first.

Clevo M570TU
17.1" LG W1 Glossy WUXGA (1920x1200)
Intel QX9300 2.53GHz (OC @ 2.93 GHz)
Kingston 4GB DDR3 1066MHz (OC @ 5-5-5-15)
Seagate 7200.4 500GB ASG
Nvidia 9800M GTX 1GB DDR3 (OC @ 600/1500/900)

I am not at home right now so I am using my 17 inch Thermapak instead of my NC2000.

These are the global settings I use with all my games in the Nvidia control panel. I am using 182.50 WHQL drivers properly installed last night.



GTAIV is the steam version updated to 1.0.3.0. I use the following command lines when I play: -framelimit 1 -refreshrate 30 -fullspecaudio -memrestrict -memrestrict 629145600.

GTAIV is the only game that I play capped at 30fps. But for the sake of this test, I have changed -refreshrate to 60.

The game contains only one mod, and that is the Ultimate Graphic Tweak by bartekxyz.

Here are the graphics settings that I play with.



Here are my temperatures after 15 minutes of idling from a coldboot. (I was testing a few MATLAB lines on one of the computer lab's terminals during those 15 minutes, so my laptop was doing absolutely nothing.)



Ambient temperature is ~72*F

And these are the temps after I have finished my run-around Broker and Dukes.



My take on it is that the mean fps will always stay above 40 unless I'm tearing the city apart where the fps would dip into the 30's. Before I stopped playing GTAIV a few weeks ago, the lowest fps I have observed was 25, and that was in the conditions that I mentioned in my response to the OP; "100 traffic density in a six star chase in Algonquin with storming rains at nighttime." Also to mention that those conditions were on the 1.0.2.0 patch on with an older Nvidia driver and before I have done heavy heatsink modding to my laptop.

And for your pleasure, here's a peak of my run through the east borough. (It's in reverse order so start from the bottom.)

 

hmm....1066 CL5 is nice. Mine is not stable @CL5......

 

Save yourself $400, buy a QS QX9300 from eBay for $449.88 and install it yourself.

If you ever have to send the notebook in for repair, just swap the old one back into it.

 

Sure. No problem, terrytownpc.

I tried running the game again in silent mode where the QX9300 would be limited to 2.13GHz. I tried to simulate my last run as best as I could, though the police wouldn't let me, and the performance was still fairly decent. The difference is deeper drops in fps in high action chaos, yet my fps never fell below 25, with the exception of when I camped in the hospital in Schottler and picked off cops from behind the chairs. A lot of police cars and dead cops all over the hospital floor can explain the fps drop.

 

Wich RAM brand have you kaltmod ?? and you terrytownpc?
For RAM OCed do you mean SPD flashed to that latencies ?

 

Hey terrytownpc, do you want to buy a Q9100 instead? I got a fresh one sitting around if you're interested. Poor little CPU needs a home.

 

Do you think a Q9000 with 3GB DDR3 RAM, Windows XP SP3 and a GTX260M 1GB DDR3 will be able to run GTA IV reasonably?

I wonder how much better a Q9100 will run it.

 

Both the Q9000 and the Q9100 will run the game at a playable framerate with settings well above the console equivalent.

 

I was hoping this would be the case. I have played IV on the Xbox 360 and even though it suffers a few slow downs every now and then, it is still very playable. I can't wait to try this on my NP8662, when it arrives that is.

 

You're going to forget all about the Xbox 360 version when you start playing on your NP8662. I can guarantee you that.

 

How much of a difference will there be pairing the high end GPU with a dual core instead of the quad for GTA4?

 

The difference will be noticable on a dual core compared to a quad. When I run the game with two cores disabled, it runs just as fast compared to running with all four cores. However, when the action starts to heat up the slightest bit in the game, the fps drop is more severe when playing with only two cores. Even if playing with two cores at 2.93Ghz and four cores at 2.13Ghz, fps will still drop sharper with the two core setup. In short, the game is perfectly playable on dual core with mild above-console settings. You just won't be able to crank the settings as far as you would like and you will run into deep drops in fps when there are a lot of physics and AI calculations being processed.

There are a lot of testimonies from people talking about their results from the ingame benchmarking tool. The benchmark tool in GTA IV is geared more for the GPU rather than the CPU; the pre-orchestrated run through Star Junction is hardly CPU intensive as there are barely any models and doodads in the area and the traffic and pedestrians are turned off. This makes the benchmark tool unreliable for gauging the CPU, and ultimately overall performance. The only way to test performance is to play the game and use Fraps or other similar apps to monitor fps. And I am going to go under the assumption that the computer is clean and doesn't have garbage running in the background and whatnot.

 

Take a look at this Youtube clip of GTA IV running showing how much percentage is used in each core and then imagine how much it would use if it only had access to two cores.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHPcbmv1ii0

The problem with running GTA IV with dual cores is that it will not leave any CPU time spare, even a 2.98 Ghz Dual Core will get totally maxed out.

 

Hey Soviet Sunrise...what clock generator did you chose in SetFSB to overclock the FSB of the M570ETU?