~! Ultimate GTAIV Performance Fix !~, Sticky This! ~ Please!

waynio

waynio

waynio

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I found this on gta forums and works unbelievably well:cool:

here is the best tweak for this game yet, well worth doing
my bro's system is stock q6600 with 4gb ddr2 @ 800 and a 8800GTX with the tweak he is getting pretty solid very playable fps with 1080p res / textures on high / rendereing on high / view distance of 15 / detail distance of 40 / vehicle density 60 / shadow 1

it has also benefitted my 4870x2 big time, forget about the so called system of the future when you already have a power house pc which handles crysis just fine

i am so glad i did not change back to a fast dual core as i almost did, this game uses all 4 cores, atlast the quad has really come into its own in a proper game :)

original tweak from here, max respect to the guys at gta forums and MonkeyMhz for making the guide, it is an in depth and easy to follow guide as long as you read it properly
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=384473


to make the commandline.txt as mentioned in the guide above all you do is make a new text doc and rename it to commandline.txt open it and add your command line like "-availablevidmem 2.0 -height 1200 -width 1920 -availablevidmem 0.80" without the quotes, then save it and drop it into your gta folder where the game is installed and your done and can enjoy the game.
 
Well like I hinted on GTAforums, since the game is 32bit only you can only address up to something like 2.4GB of memory anyway ? so if you have a 512MB card and are telling it to virtualise system memory as VRAM by 2.0 multiplier then surely at high resolution and settings (which is the point of having the higher VRAM available in the first place) this 32bit limitation is quickly reached especially considering at these settings GTA4 uses a lot of RAM to begin with? (around 1.1GB of system RAM from my ALT-Tabbing)
 
good info mrk, be nice if R* released a 64bit patch as well as other performance patches eh.
i'm not yet a member on gta forums, want to say thanks to the people who worked this out, awesome trick

for anyone who did not understand my vague discription here is a little more, so hopefully you can pull this tweak off.

i'm on a q6600 also but overclocked to 3.6ghz.
i don't know exactly what it does, but the main graphic flaw i notice with this tweak for me is shadows on buildings seem a little odd and the water does not look as rippled but still has proper motion, a tiny sacrifice which i hardly notice, all other shadows seem fine thou.

the tweak i mention is only a heads up and how to do the settings file, if you read the guide on the link and then combine the txt bit, it should make a pretty good difference in your performance, i am amazed how much better and smooth it is now with the high settings i'm running with, even my bro's looks amazing compared to what it did without the tweak, it will definately keep me going until R* release more patches.

so only use -availablevidmem 2.0 1st to set the memory multiplier it doubles the vid mem you see in options
then start the game and go to your options then set the res to 800x600 the lower the better
then tune up the settings using a realistic vid mem budget, myself i kept well within the memory restriction for my card 1gb and it read about 790mb remember how much vid mem is used, then close the game.

so on my txt file i would add -availablevidmem 0.80 he had a math for it but for me it seemed to work fine just closing it at 800, the -availablevidmem command is to make the available vid mem really close to what it will use, if its less it will not work and will run it at your specified res but put every setting on lowest so you might have to go through the process a couple of times before you get it right.
this is my command line that i use
-availablevidmem 2.0 -height 1200 -width 1920 -availablevidmem 0.80
i think it should just be this thou considering i am not going over what my graphics card has
-height 1200 -width 1920 -availablevidmem 0.80
it has also made my game very stable

to be honest i don't really know why the need for the -availablevidmem 2.0 especially as mrk pointed out about it being 32bit only but it was in his guide so i used it as its usually a good idea to follow if your following a guide, does not seem much point in having it say what you have not got.

the multiplier part is basicly just so you can configure the settings to what you want, just does not make a lot of sense to me with a 1gb card

before i had to run it at lowish settings to get a really good playable frame rate
 
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Thanks. I'll give this a go tonight.

Got the game but I haven't played it yet as it's unbelievably jerky.

I need a better GFX card I think. 8800GT with a X2 6000+ and 4GB RAM.
 
Just tested this: "X:\Program Files (x86)\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -height 1050 -width 1680 -availablevidmem 2.0

Results were.. umm... im able to play at my natural res without jerking like before? but hey at least it works O_O;;

I'm still wanting to play in a window though, i tried adding -win -window and -windowed commands to it, didnt work :(

Statistics
Average FPS: 10.63
Duration: 38.56 sec
CPU Usage: 51%
System memory usage: 75%
Video memory usage: 100%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: Medium
Render Quality: Very High
View Distance: 30
Detail Distance: 100

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Home Premium
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Video Driver version: 179.28
Audio Adapter: Speakers and Dual Headphones (IDT High Definition Audio CODEC)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz
 
Hm, can't seem to get this working atm....problem is I've got a 512mb card, so I need to work out the vidmem settings for that :p
 
Would it only affect places where there are reflections as that is being forced to run at a lower res. Everything else would run the same it seems?
 
Doesn't even work for me, i managed to get the res to stay at 800x600 when going back in, but then everything else was on 1 with shadows off, and it was saying ive exceeded my memory as i only had 210mb to play with:confused:

Anyone know what my commandline shoud read with a 512mb 4850 and 2gb Ram in XP, with the settings im using saying my memory usage is 387 out of 486.
 
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LoadsaMoney said:
Doesn't even work for me, i managed to get the res to stay at 800x600 when going back in, but then everything else was on 1 with shadows off, and it was saying ive exceeded my memory as i only had 210mb to play with:confused:

Anyone know what my commandline shoud read with a 512mb 4850 and 2gb Ram in XP, with the settings im using saying my memory usage is 387 out of 486.
Click to expand...

Yeah....it reset all down to 0/1 because that last command line was setup incorrectly, I can't tell you the exact amount to put, as I'm wondering it myself :p

If it didn't take so long to go ingame everytime I'd tinker a bit more, but apparently you can't disable the intro movies etc due to the copy protection stuff?

EDIT: Going by the articles logic though, shouldn't you just half the number he did? As his card is 1024mb as opposed to 512mb...?
 
peterattheboro said:
Thanks. I'll give this a go tonight.

Got the game but I haven't played it yet as it's unbelievably jerky.

I need a better GFX card I think. 8800GT with a X2 6000+ and 4GB RAM.
Click to expand...

noo you need better cpu same for me... best would be to get phenom x4 gfx is still good enough just game requires loads of cpu power
 
the main problem for me is the constant crashing, especially when going to the menu screen. seems to me like a very poor port of the game which is a real shame, as the game itself rocks.
 
MossyUK said:
the main problem for me is the constant crashing, especially when going to the menu screen. seems to me like a very poor port of the game which is a real shame, as the game itself rocks.
Click to expand...

I have yet to have it crash, just rubbish performance. The games not too bad though, I keep coming back for one last mission...
 
the 2.0 vmem option is only for those that need to set it to a higher memory setting because game is reading incorrectly or you have a truly terrible card, IE the guy using that setting was like onboard gfx crap, ignore it.

the mem multipler to use is simple, if it says you have 486mb available and the options at 800x600 say you're using 387 you need to make the game think you have call it 400mb, so use whatever multiplier would turn 486 into 400, 100/486 x 400 =82% so use 0.82.


It seems odd at best, the only thing its really changing is the resolution of reflections as far as he describes, its not like just because you use 400mb at 800x600 you'll continue to do so at 1920x1200, its just if the reflections are using up 40mb at 800x600 they'd normally scale to use 150mb at the higher res, this hack keeps it using the same amount it would at the lower res. Its not a terrible option because, how long do you spend looking at the water in the game.

Its a pee poor optimised game wasting memory and power on lots of stuff you don't see.

It also doesn't need a quad, it just needs one core at a high speed. my Q6600, it has one very heavy thread stuck on one core, thats the only one limited(at 3.4Ghz at the moment), the other 3 threads it puts on the other 3 cores barely use one core put together. Realistically you need headroom just for that one heavy thread, maybe 3.6Ghz, or even more, at that speed a dual should do fine aswell. As I increase speed that one thread stays at 100% on that core, while the other threads reduce in percentage on the other cores as they get faster, those threads aren't limited, its just the one uber thread. IF they could split that up any more there would be no problem and it would run better on a much lower quad.
 
Still can't get it to work here, but what i did find was, that if i just had -availablevidmem 2.0 in the commandline, so that it thought i had a 1gb card instad of a 512, it stopped me texture disappearing issue, and seems a tad smoother, so im happy with that :D
 
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