GTA 3 Slowdown Problem

Zero

Wondering has anyone come across this with GTA3....

It was working fine for a few days, bare slowdown in the odd place, but thats to be expected at certain points in the game. Then for no reason it started going mad slow, too bad to even drive a car on an empty street. I thought it had to be windows settings (swapfile etc) or slow CDROM (mine broke recently, ancient one in it) that may have been causing the game to slow down but this happens even when HDD and CDROM arent active.
It can't be machine specs, it was running on a P3 1GHz with a Geforce2 GTS and a quarter gig of ram.
I had intended reinstalling the machine soon anyway, so I wiped the PC and reinstalled it, it now has a 64Mb Geforce 3 in it, and still there is slowdown. If it had been happening all the time I wouldnt mind, but the first couple of days we ran it it was flying....i dunno

saik

heh, the cheek, i'll ask anyway
did you pay for it?
my warezed version of op flashpoint gave similar symptoms.
purchased version worked grand :?

koneko

God, don't get me started on GTA3. I love playing it, it's fun, violent, lots of laughs, but it's slow as a dog.

Myself and my bloke have high-spec systems. Radeon 8400 cards, GF4 cards, P4s, Athlon XPs. Slow as **** half the time on all of them. I still haven't found what's causing it.

We're not the only ones though. So far a lot of people have been complaining. Check our the lads on HardOCP. They absolutely hate the game now cos they had to many problems getting it running

If I find anything, I'll post it here.

[edit]BTW mine's the full retail copy. Run it with the CD. No cracks or anything installed. Clean as it can be [/edit]

Celt

At least 50% of people are experiencing slow downs that has nothing to do with there systems(from what I have read on ng's).
One thing, try changing the audio drivers it uses and see if it gets any better with different ones.

Zero

Cheers Koneko.

Celt, whats ng's?

Saruman

Very true about the audio drivers there.. i know on other games like Driver for instance the audio drivers cause slow downs.. lates ones were better.. also make sure EAX is turned off, if its on there will usaully be a big lag!

Samson

I too have found GTA3 very slow.
My system specs. are:
Athlon 1.2 (running at 1.33Ghz)
512MB RAM
Radeon 8500

To make the game playable I had to turn off the car radio and drop the resolution to 800 x 600 16 bit.

Celt

Originally posted by Zero
Cheers Koneko.

Celt, whats ng's?

newsgroups specifically aggta(alt.games.grand-theft-auto)

lynchie

Im running it with the following specs with no slowdown at all!!!

p3 800eb
512mb ram
MSI GeForce 4 ti4400

Have it running at 1024x768x32 with the distance setting up all the way.

KdjaCL

I dont ahve a problem with mine
gf3 ti 500/1024 ram/800 duron.
Im using a built in 5.1 C-Media soundcard and it does the job .
www.gta3.com and www.gamefaqs.com in the message boards is a lot of similiar problems most related to defrag and sound issues.
I was on them to get the tank cheat which is pause the game type in "giveusatank" and resume.
I was stuck on a mission so wanted to play squish the police.
Btw has anyone got their wanted level to 6? i can only get it to 5.
Kdja

DiscoStu

i think you can only get it up to 6 on shoreside. dont know yet coz im stuck on staunton on rays second mission. as for slowdowns i havent came across any problems and im only using a p3 500 and gf2 mx

Praetorian

Runs perfectly on my 1800xp with 512mb and GF3 Everthing maxed (well 1200 x 1024 32bit color)

Runs slightly sluggish on my brothers 1800xp 256mb ram and GF2 GTS

Ive checked while running the game and surprisingly GTA3 only uses about 128MB ram...so my conclusion is that its heavily dependent on Graphics card power rather than memory / CPU

Celt

Originally posted by Praetorian
Runs perfectly on my 1800xp with 512mb and GF3 Everthing maxed (well 1200 x 1024 32bit color)

Runs slightly sluggish on my brothers 1800xp 256mb ram and GF2 GTS

Ive checked while running the game and surprisingly GTA3 only uses about 128MB ram...so my conclusion is that its heavily dependent on Graphics card power rather than memory / CPU

Unfortunately that would appear to be an incorrect conclusion as I have seen people with GF2GTS;'s having no problems while people with GF4 Ti 4400 find the game unplyable on anything above 800*

Lex_Diamonds

p3 1ghz
256 ram
geforce 4 ti4400

resolution: 1280X1024 32bit colour

Draw Distance: Max

Game runs very well. (i love grfx card dependent games)

Mills

I get a lot of slowdown every time I start it up, for about 10 minutes, it's especially bad when I drive somewhere I haven't been before. This wasn't such a big problem until I got to staunton island, and the first mission, every time I go unto a different island I get the slowdown for 10 minutes, which makes that first mission very difficult and I just couldn't be bothered with it.

suppafly

Yeah I jsut got it today and was experiencing the same slow down and kind of jerkyness. What is the best audi driver to put it too and is there anything else u can do to get ride of the slow down?

Makaveli

p4 1.6ghz. gf3 ti200 256mb ram.
No slowdown except for when the cd sometimes skips a bit and then the game hangs. This happens quite a bit actually.
Do you think if I used a no cd crack on the game I could eliminate this problem?

[edit]Forgot to add
Resolution: 1280X1024 32bit colour
Draw Distance: Max [/edit]

Firefox

Just Got GTA 3 Yesterday and seem to be suffering the same promlems........Periodic slowdown piticularly when driving around.

It's fine when your walking around though.

My Spec :P4 1.8Ghz, 256Mb Ram, Geforce 2 MX.

I suppose there will be patches out any day soon.

Lex_Diamonds

Ouch man, get a new gfx card, its a crime to link it up with a fine cpu like that

suppafly

Hard Disk Defrag
If you are experiencing short, periodic slowdowns whilst driving, Grand Theft Auto III may be having trouble retrieving data at a fast enough rate from your hard disk. It is recommended that you run your systems Defragmentation utility regularly to allow optimum speed in the game’s performance.

So thats what it says in the readme file, but i don't think thats the problem with my computer, and i have the same specs as firefox. Has anybody found anything useful reduce the slow down?

KdjaCL

All you ppl cursed me
it was fine for me ran perfect no slowdown then I
Bought my 1st optical mouse today and instant slowdown.
I had a wheel mouse until today and since i started playing it with the Logitech optical its gone mad real slow.

By any chance do the ppl with slowdown have optical mice?
kdja

Giblet

First City = 4 max stars
Second = 5 max Stars
Third = 6 max stars

satchmo

Yeah, my GTA3 slows down, and yeah I have an optical mouse. Hmmmm.....