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5970 + GTA IV

blinghound

blinghound

blinghound

Associate
Joined
23 Jul 2009
Posts
142
Location
England
Hey guys and gals

I recently purchased GTA EFLC in the recent steam sales, and I've been so disappointed with the performance :(.. its driving my bleedin' head in :p.

With the rig in sig (q9550 at 4.2ghz with a 2gb 5970) with the following settings

1920x1200
Texture = High
Shadows = High
Reflection = High
Water = High
Texture filter quality = 16x
Night Shadows = High
View distance = 40
Detail = 40

I'm only getting 20fps on the benchmark, so you can expect that the performance in game is much worse at times.

The benchmark results also indicated that only 38% of the video memory was being used, and MSI afterburner showed that both gpus were working, but only at 30% each, with one spike of 80% throughout playing :/

Not only is the fps low, the game feels like its loading all the data from a DVD; even in the first cutscene the game had a hard time keeping up, with textures slowly popping in all over the place.

I have tried different drivers, tried reinstalling the game, tried stock clocks on both Cpu and Gpu, tried disabling steam overlay and I've also tried popping the game on my SSD.


Any advice at all is appreciated, I really want this game to work bad.

Cheers
 
turn shadows off and night shadows off also.You`ll notice a big increase right away (or try low settings for shadows but dont bother with night shadows at all).
Also try view distance around 30 and detail 30 also try cars around 50 ish (doesn`t really impact it that bad).Check if your vsync is also OFF (unless you have triplebuffering ON).

GTA 4 is also very much cpu bound with 4 cores performing much better than 2,i have an i7 920 but im pretty sure your q9550 isnt a million miles behind so it sounds like either the shadows or vsync maybe responsible.
 
Runs better on Nvidia cards plus Core i7. Think it does not support SLI/Crossfire either so your only using 1 GPU not both in your 5970 & to run it maxed out @ 1920x1200 with all settings to the max you need 1499Mb VRam. 5970 is 1GB per GPU I think so your only using 1GB Vram max.

I get 45-60FPS on my GTX580 & 30-45 on my GTX480 with max everything. Only time it slows is when flying over the city in a helicopter & the new data streams in from Hard Disk.

20FPS is right for 1 GPU which is effectively a 5870. This is the big problem with dual GPU gfx cards there are always some games which just ignore dual GPU's & only run on 1 GPU so its running on 50% only of your GPU unfortunately.
 
Turn everything down to lowest apart from res, and see what you get. Then add things on.
 
hmm very odd :( ,must admit on mine its one of the main culprits for impacting the framerate in game.I use 2x5870 in xfire so only marginally quicker than your 5970 and i get 90+ frames dropping to around the low 50`s ish mostly.I would have thought you would get much the same(less 10% ish).Defo not got v-sync on? either in game or in the CCC panel?
 
I definetely do not have v-sync on, my friend tested with the same settings and pretty much the same hardware (q9650, 8gb ram and 5970) and came out with 70fps, so I know it can't be the fact that nvidia cards run it better :(

to Klo, the max I get is 50fps with everything at lowest, although shadows and view distance make the largest (albeit small 5fps) difference.
 
Bit of a long shot but have you tried reducing your Overclock on your cpu?like i said gta 4 is VERY cpu intensive(i get some of my highest temps from using it with all 4 cores sometimes in the 80% range) so maybe your o/c is being pushed a little further than it would like? ...worth a try maybe.
 
AWPC said:
20FPS is right for 1 GPU which is effectively a 5870. This is the big problem with dual GPU gfx cards there are always some games which just ignore dual GPU's & only run on 1 GPU so its running on 50% only of your GPU unfortunately.
Click to expand...

I was getting a constant 30fps at 1920x1080 with v-sync enabled (the TV I was using only supported 30Hz refresh rate and forced v-sync on) on my 4890 with the same settings as the OP's playing with. Seeing as my fps never went below 30, I assume I'd probably get like 35-40fps with v-sync disabled (if I could disable it on the TV). On my monitor, I was getting about 45-50fps, albeit at 1680x1050. A card that is effectively just a single 5870 in GTA IV should be getting a bit more than my lowly old 4890, so something is definitely wrong.

My GTX470 doesn't fair much better than my 4890 (maybe like a 5fps increase -- nothing special), but that's probably just because GTA IV is so dependant on a fast CPU and mine is still at stock.

I also find Shadows on High isn't that bad; it's when you turn them up to Very High where your performance ends up being slaughtered. Night Shadows should also be fine on High.
 
Oh before i forget :) ...its nice to get it running at 60+ fps for the whole game but there is ONE section on the very last mission that you will want to run at 30FPS or as close to that as you can.I wont do to much of a spoiler but it involves the helicopter section and having to high a frame rate makes it IMPOSSIBLE to continue (the higher it is the worse it gets :) ).

Sounds odd but it`s something to do with the timing in game which betrays it`s console/30 fps heritege ;)
 
@Dash RipRock
Like I've said, I have tried my cpu and gpu at stock volts :(, it only made it slightly worse.

And I agree with you tricky, one core of my 5970 should make the game at least playable :/, it just feels unplayable at the moment, like the hard drive (its on an ssd, tried it on a conventional drive as well) is not keeping up, however low the settings are.
 
I pulled this from the forum over at Steam, it might be of use. I'm about to pick this game up myself.

Seems the -percentvidmem "100" line in the config is the golden ticket here.

I had similar issue wheregta4 wasn't reading all avail memory on gtx 260, but just a single card. regardless this trick might work for u. let us know!

First, make a text document, call it Commandline.txt. Save it in your GTA4 folder.

in the document, type in as follows:

-norestriction
-nomemrestrict
-availablevidmem "x"
-percentvidmem "x"

^^^these are must have.

ok so the first "x" for the -availablevidmem can be set how much ram you have. For me, i have 1GB VRAM total (HD 3870 x2, 2 x 512MB of VRAM), so i would need to type in -availablevidmem 2.0. If you have 512MB of VRAM, then -availablevidmem 1.0. The -nomemrestrict makes it so you can change how much memory from your VRAM to be and used but displays how high the availablevidmem is set to. As for the -percentvidmem, i just put 100 so i can use 100% of all of the VRAM, so type in like so: -percentvidmem 100.
Click to expand...
 
Thank you Damolee for that info! :) although, it does show that my 5970 does have 2gb of video memory available in the graphics menu (even though in reality the 5970 has 1gb of video memory duplicated), it just isn't using it apparently :/.

Can anyone with a 5970 and GTA IV share their results? this is driving me nuts!
 
had similar problems with a 5850 and an overclocked quad getting 15-20fps in game. A 1GB 460 with the same cpu gets 45+. Driver issue maybe?
 
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