Another pc gaming rant.

r2d2

r2d2

r2d2

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I have noticed more and more having to deal with games which don't seem to playable at any setting/resolution. I don't recall trying to play a game which would not go above 30fps at any setting in the past.

The other day I bought GTAIV and just found it unbelievable that a developer would release a game which would not go above 30 fps at any res/settings for me, on a q6600 @ 3.4 and 295 gtx OCed to 678/1099/1380 etc. I dled the patches and there wasnt much more improvement. The gameplay itself seems really good. I can play crysis at 2xAA 1920 1200 everything very high smoothly between 25-60 fps. What went wrong with this game? I saw a guy o youtube running a i7 965 oced to 4.5 ghz i think and he was getting 60 fps. Is thats what needed for this game lol.

There currently seem to be two types of pc game. Those which look great like Mirrors edge which you can play maxed out on every setting at 60fps, and those which get hyped and look decent which you need to spend 2 days tweaking to be "playable".

I appreciate the nature of the pc enables the user to be able to tweak etc but there comes a point where you can't spend a whole day trying to get a game to work.
 
Phatjayunoi said:
GTAIV is an example of a unoptimised Console port for the PC whereas with Crysis, well its Crysis. :D
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Crysis is very playable for me now maxed out.

GTAIV doesnt want to go above 30 fps at any setting! I took a risk thinking I might be one of the lucky ones who it works well for.
 
gta iv is rubish... unfinished game... delevelopers should have put another 2moths of work in to it... :/ good game play but you need a system which cost over 1k just to get it over 30fps... :/ i can play crysis on high settings no aa i cant get gta iv to run on lowest posible settings.. :/
 
grudas said:
gta iv is rubish... unfinished game... delevelopers should have put another 2moths of work in to it... :/ good game play but you need a system which cost over 1k just to get it over 30fps... :/ i can play crysis on high settings no aa i cant get gta iv to run on lowest posible settings.. :/
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The gameplay from what I have seen so far seems really good. The game just doesnt wanna run though! I mean the graphics arent that good. The character models are pretty poor etc, esp in the cut scenes.

Seems like we have a similar experience here, with regards to crysis.
 
Err?
I have a 295 GTX and i play GTA4 at 2560x1600 on the highest setting and get over 30FPS almost all the time. So obviously something is wrong with your computer.
Make sure you have lastest drivers, latest DirectX, and the .Net framework 3.5 and the service pack for it (important!).

And before some idiot says it's because of my CPU - it's not. The game barely uses 10% CPU usage on my i7 at the most demanding of times. Same with just about any other game, all this **** the kids post on these forums about needing a super fast processor for a game of any sort is rubbish.

For instance: Crysis, GTA4, GRID, Oblivion, COD4, COD5, Mirrors Edge, Fallout3 - all use 25% CPU usage or under on my old 3.7GHz penryn quad.

I mean the graphics arent that good. The character models are pretty poor etc, esp in the cut scenes.
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The graphics are actually very good, on the highest settings. When you create a world as complex as GTA4 you cant have super high polygon counts on people when theres easily over 30+ people on screen at once in areas, with 20+ cars.
You can go the Crysis route with low amounts of enemies and high polygon counts + high res textures, or have tons of people + cars + a complex city and do it the GTA way.
If GTA4 had characters looking anything near as good as the ones in Crysis and cars looking as good as in GRID, then THAT would cripple any PC.
 
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I have two monitors, i run task manager on the second screen. The most GTA4 ever uses @ 2560x1600 + highest settings is 15%. Sometimes it's down to 5% CPU usage. Or is that considered CPU intensive to you?

Yeah i have a highly OC'd i7, but the fact is the OP's Q6600 at 3.4GHz is easily going to cope.
 
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The thing i dont understand is that the 295 gtx is about 10X better than the Graphics cards inside the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet it cant runs games as good on the PC rather than the consoles. its a complete joke
 
Jamesdavid3 said:
The thing i dont understand is that the 295 gtx is about 10X better than the Graphics cards inside the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet it cant runs games as good on the PC rather than the consoles. its a complete joke
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Yeah everyone agrees with you but this is what happens nowadays. PC is not the first choice at all as piracy means games sell a lot less so naturally they put much less effort into optimising for PC. Most ports are 360 based as its easier & cheaper to port these to PC. If they really spent time optimising for PC you can add 6-9 months alone of tweaking for performance but those days are now long gone so the near future is going to be more console ports if were lucky and if were unlucky a lot less PC games.

GTA4 does look reasonable on full settings and considering the gameworld size its an achievement it even runs on PC @ 50% more pixels + much better gfx than the less than 720P console versions. The console versions of GTA4 looks really nasty in places and struggle with 20-25FPS most of the time as well as severe screen tearing.

GTA4 gameplay wise lacks a lot of what made Vice City & San Andreas great anyway.
 
Jamesdavid3 said:
The thing i dont understand is that the 295 gtx is about 10X better than the Graphics cards inside the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet it cant runs games as good on the PC rather than the consoles. its a complete joke
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It can though, the ps3/360 versions of GTA are pretty low spec if you were to run them on a pc, 1280x720 medium settings at a push and 30fps, even a 8800gt can do those easily on the pc.

I love gta on the pc, it looks great, it runs well for me on my i7 and gtx275.
 
it was a 'terrible over-rated badly ported below average console game', the worlds greatest PC wouldnt make it any better.

the game was written/coded specifically for the consoles hence why it looks and runs better... Graphics do not make a good game, but even the gameplay couldnt save this turd :eek:
 
Only thing that's bothered me about this malarkey is that the min and recommended specs for Crysis were a complete and utter lie. Everything about the games performance was a big lie actually, remember the videos that looked epic that they claimed were running on an old 8800GTS model (as in, not the 512mb revision)?

I ended up playing it on a PC with greater specs than the recommended and it still ran pretty poop on Medium settings at places. That said at least i enjoyed the game other than that. Warhead was a massive improvement in terms of performance for me which just proved that the original Crysis was a poorly optimised game in my eyes.

I was under the impression that Rockstar never made a secret of the fact that GTAIV required a beast of a PC for it to run, i recall them even saying quad core was pretty much a must. Not sure though as i knew the game was not for me when i got it on the PS3, as was said above, it would take more than better graphics and a higher framerate to make that a good game in my eyes.
 
GTA runs fine at 1920x1200 on the rig in my sig (either CPU as it goes, seems to make minimal difference). I get about 40 fps, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. View distance is at about 2 and density to about 50, everything else turned up.

It looks and plays much nicer than it did on my 360.
 
Bear in mind the draw distances make a big difference, at least for me. I found dropping both detail distance and view distance to 1 gave me a fair boost, the recommended settings were much higher. It's easy to test it if you run FRAPS in the background, start a game and then monitor the framerate while changing the distances.

Somewhat surprised to see your problems considering you have a quadcore cpu though. Make sure you have vsync disabled for starters (the fact you keep mentioning 30fps makes me think you might have a 60hz refresh rate with vsync enabled)
 
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