GTA4 Framerate issues

Drexel

Hey

Is there any solution to the frame rate issues in GTA4 on the pc? I got the steam deal on all the rockstar games but gta and EFLC all run at a really crappy framerate. 15-17FPS. It doesnt matter what settings i pick it still always drops to the low frame rate after a few minutes. When i first turn it on its runnin between 30 - 40 which is fine. Was readin up on it and alot of people had the same trouble. Just wondering did ne one in here manage to sort it out??

Thanks!!

leninbenjamin

Perhaps a silly question, but is it patched? Sometimes Steam don't automatically update 3rd party games...

Drexel

Hey thanks for gettin back to me. As far as I can tell everything is up to date. Reading steam forums alot of people seem to have the same issues with gta and there doesnt seem to be much of a solution!

PogMoThoin

Whats Your specs? Gta4 is known for bringing the best pcs to their knees, runs better on a quad with lots of ram and a 1GB gpu

Solitaire

Yup. A slow dualie - and we're talking Core2s here, not old Pentiums - will bring the framerate to its knees at any resolution regardless of GPU. You need at least a very fast dualie - and preferably a moderately quick tricore or quad - to really make GTA4 play ball

Drexel

what a balls!! Id say i just need to upgrade

i got

AMD Athlon 64x2 dual core 6000+
4gb memory
GeForce 8800GT

Running Windows 7.

Ne one ne ideas for improving the frame rate? Really wanna play the episodes!

Thanks

Solitaire

Drop as much detail as you can or new build. That system is barely minimum spec for GTA4 IIRC and I doubt you'll be able to OC it much

TiGeR KiNgS

GTA4 really needs a quad core cpu to run it acceptably, as previous poster mentioned your system is limited so nothing you can really do about the frame-rate issues unfortunately.

leninbenjamin

Why would it be 30-40fps for a few minutes at first though and then drop down? Sounds more like a memory leak but most of them have been fixed in recent patches.

Solitaire

... or software that has a memory leak or is a walking memory/CPU leak (antivirus anyone? ) is coming on in the background?

lmimmfn

leninbenjamin wrote: »

Why would it be 30-40fps for a few minutes at first though and then drop down? Sounds more like a memory leak but most of them have been fixed in recent patches.

it does have a memory leak and runs like crap after a while( still ), but it crawls on dual cores because they cpu usage on both cores is through the roof and it streams data even when you just turn around, meaning turning around quickly on dual cores makes the frame rate drop to a crawl. I tried it on an E6400@3.55Ghz and it was completely unplayable, the PS3 version isint much better tbh.

On an i7 it runs with 60-80FPS average, dropping to 44 in the odd place.

One thing though turn off that clip capture, it reduces stuttering on dual cores( although with the latest patch and on a quad it is smoother with it ON!!! )

lmimmfn

lmimmfn wrote: »

it does have a memory leak and runs like crap after a while( still ), but it crawls on dual cores because they cpu usage on both cores is through the roof and it streams data even when you just turn around, meaning turning around quickly on dual cores makes the frame rate drop to a crawl. I tried it on an E6400@3.55Ghz and it was completely unplayable, the PS3 version isint much better tbh.

On an i7 it runs with 60-80FPS average, dropping to 44 in the odd place.

One thing though turn off that clip capture, it reduces stuttering on dual cores( although with the latest patch and on a quad it is smoother with it ON!!! )

Runs great on an E8400@ 4.3GHz!! But ya, even at 4GHz it loses about 3-5FPS on my rig

lmimmfn

Deleted User wrote: »

Runs great on an E8400@ 4.3GHz!! But ya, even at 4GHz it loses about 3-5FPS on my rig

yeah if you can get a dual core fast enough it can be playable, i get a huge increase in FPS on my i7 at 4Ghz compared to stock

Solitaire

Heh... I average 39fps with my 3.33GHz E5200, but sudden view distance/angle shifts throw the game into conniptions

Problem is that the port is inherently tri-threaded from what I've seen, and even then hungry for serious compute power on each core. A forth core isn't that effective even, and AFAIK HyperThreading isn't much use either. But trying to run it on a dualie effectively forces the game to run the third thread in "software" which incurs huge FPS penalties even on a fastish dualie as every spare CPU cycle is gobbled up

Drexel

Ive being tryin to play it with a frame rate of about 15 - 20fps and i just cant! It deserves much better. Upgrade time me thinks.

Is there some problem with komplett at the moment? Thats more then likely when il be buyin from and i remember seeing a thread somewhere sayin something about komplett. Cant remember tho.

Rezident

Even on my quad GTA IV runs very poorly - considering the graphics on show. I mean there are far more beautiful games that run much better. I'm no pro code monkie myself but after hours of tinkering with the game, I had to conclude that it's just not made properly. Just Cause 2 is a similar sandbox game (only more beautiful), and it runs much much better than GTA IV. It's a terrible shame because there's so much great content in GTA IV if only it performed properly.

Also, claims that graphics cards don't have enough VRAM for it are also false, I have 2gigs of GDDR5 on my card and GTA IV still runs rubbish. The game simply wasn't optimised properly compared with other games.

Solitaire

Rezident - Yup, my HD4830 doesn't even max out its GDDR3 with GTA4 at high settings!

Jonny666 - Yes, Komplett are FUBAR for the foreseeable future

Drexel

Thanks Solitaire. Can you recommend any other place to get a processor from? All I know is Komplett. Shame its gone FUBAR as you say!

Lu Tze

The bargain alerts might help

6 core if you have am3
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=65794550&postcount=314

2 core with possibility of unlocking two more
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=65827900&postcount=316

Disclaimer: price may have changed, haven't checked the links!

Rezident

Solitaire wrote: »

Rezident - Yup, my HD4830 doesn't even max out its GDDR3 with GTA4 at high settings!

Jonny666 - Yes, Komplett are FUBAR for the foreseeable future

What happened komplett? I was wondering, I used to get stuff there all the time, going back two or three full system builds ago. Service and support was always pretty good too. I always compare prices on a few different sites and komplett used to be there or there abouts but lately they're always more expensive, when they even have the stuff.

Looking at getting a 5870 now and they don't have any! I mean, one of the best graphics cards around and they don't even have one on their website, let alone in stock! What happened?

Solitaire

They were taken over and forced to cede their databases to the purchaser's servers. Then some unthinkably dense minion completely screws up the port and the data ends up corrupted and there's some issue with the backups so Komplett's data winds up FUBAR :mad:

Rezident

Solitaire wrote: »

They were taken over and forced to cede their databases to the purchaser's servers. Then some unthinkably dense minion completely screws up the port and the data ends up corrupted and there's some issue with the backups so Komplett's data winds up FUBAR :mad:

What!? That is almost unbelieveable. Wow. Thanks for the info, explains a few things alright.

Solitaire

Yeah, pretty mindboggling IMHO But its not impossible to order stuff from them, just not a very good idea until the secure server is fixed. Never enter credit card details into a page that doesn't begin with https! :eek:

JaTochNietDan

In general I wouldn't be looking for good performance from Grand Theft Auto: IV, it's badly ported to the PC and even with all of the patches, it still runs quite poorly on even the high end PC's today. That said, I've tried it out with the following specifications:

6GB DDR2
AMD Phenom II x4 3.4GHz
HD 5850 1GB

With that I was getting around 50FPS most of the time, and that was with the recommended settings that the game gave my PC setup, which wasn't the highest they could go.

Solitaire

GTA4 is a CPU-driven game; you need three very high-clocked cores to make it run well. Even 3.4GHz might be too low! :eek:

cherryghost

maxed out on an i7 860 @ stock wields me about 65-70fps with 8gb ram and a gtx295

yomamasflavour

Just looking through this thread and wondering what's going on.

Surely the most important bit (which nobodys asked) is what resolution you're running at?

When GTA IV first came out, I was playing it on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and an 8600m at
around 30FPS.

Clearly not maxed settings at 1920*1080 but it was perfectly playable and was how I spent half my lectures that year.

An 8800GT and the option of overclocking your processor should easily be able to put out more than 15 FPS.

cherryghost

true, my mates 2.8 core 2 and 8800GT runs at about 30-35fps on low/med at 1024x768 and my fps comes from 1680x1050

lmimmfn

the problem with dual cores is that the minimum framerate totally sux, i could easily manage 35FPS with my old E6400, but turn around and its 17FPS, for me any min framerate below 30FPS just makes a game total crap.

The latest patch makes older cards suffer also as its all of a sudden become very gpu intensive as well as cpu intensive( i get higher gpu temps on my 5850 with GTA and the TBOGT than with any other game, even Crysis!!!!! ). Maybe lower settings might improve matters with the latest patch as the main thing that changes is that the shadows actually look semi decent now rather than the rubbish dithered attempt from before.

Horsefumbler

ye i'm in the exact same boat as the OP here. thought my machine was reasonably decent, handles other games fine but the fps is just not to my liking. I've decided to upgrade

cherryghost

Horsefumbler wrote: »

ye i'm in the exact same boat as the OP here. thought my machine was reasonably decent, handles other games fine but the fps is just not to my liking. I've decided to upgrade

From what to what?...and only for GTAIV?!