GTA IV, Lagging!

Gangster

Gangster

Gangster

Soldato
Joined
30 Dec 2004
Posts
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Location
London
Hey all

I know it used to be quite a popular topic when it came out but I recently got this game and have been unable to play it on my Q6600 @ 3G, 9800GTX+ and 4GB Ram.

Everything looks fine, but i'll accelerate in the car and it will take 2 seconds for the car to move, for example. Its very laggy.

I tried even 800x600 resolution and it made no difference with all the textures etc at low.

Anyone have any ideas? I tried some tweaks such as the nomemory restriction but didn't seem to help.

Just hoping someone knows a quick, easy way of making it playable - i know my pc isn't the best specc'd but surely i must be able play it decently.

Thanks
 
Turn off the shadows, that's what I remember helping my FPS. Hate the game though, it just lost it's excitement compared to the previous ones probably because it was such a poor port you spent most of your time tweaking the graphics settings.
 
GTA 4 is a mean game to play, very bad port. Q6600@3ghz will struggle with it, mine did thats for sure. You need to turn down the view distance, amount of cars on screen. Also a huge impact on performance is the clip capture, goto menus by pressing escape, go all the way to the right and turn off the clip capture setting.

Restart game and you should see a nice increase. As in back to desktop and reload.
 
I wouldn't bother with the memory restriction tweaks, from my experience it caused more harm than good. As mentioned turn of clip capture and turn dow the view and detail distances. Night time shadows are another big one, along with a slider that alters the amount of shadows created off things like headlights on cars.

It is a difficult game to run, even when you jump up to the latest hardware performance is still hit and miss.
 
My old 8800 GTX can play it fine as long as distance detail or whatever it is called is relatively low and memory use is in the green, so it is possible to play without lag. Nvidia cards tend to fair better than some of the ATI ones - so on that basis you might be getting better experience than some people on ATI cards once set up properly - my 8800 GTX for example played it better than my 6870.:p
 
Overslop said:
It isn't a bad port. It runs like a dog on consoles too. At least with a good PC the graphics are far superior.

For the record I completed the 360 version and have the PC one now.
Click to expand...

It's somewhere in the middle. The PC version can/does look much better but it's a case of diminishing returns in terms of the hardware power you have to throw at it to make it playable when you consider the consoles' hardware. On my current PC it's quite a bit better than the PS3 version I own but when I had a dual-core, a fast one at that (e8500 @4.0ghz) I would honestly prefer to play the PS3 version.
 
Overslop said:
It isn't a bad port. It runs like a dog on consoles too. At least with a good PC the graphics are far superior.

For the record I completed the 360 version and have the PC one now.
Click to expand...

Its a very bad port, the hardware needed just to make it run anywhere near the same as the 360 is quite a lot.
 
I Rarely drop below 40fps on 1920x1080 all High (NOT Very High) Vehicle Density to 30, Draw is something like 40-50 and Detail is 30-35 I cant exactly remember. It is possible not to lag on GTA IV. Used to play fine on my Old 9800GT never dropping below around 35fps on medium settings with Detail down to 20 and Draw at 30.
 
Maybe that was my issue before with my Q6600, I had settings higher then the xbox had. I am OK now I can play it very well with new setup, but what settings on the PC version would need to be selected to be an exact copy of the 360? I take it the 360 is also locked at 30fps?
 
Console versions are just as bad, maybe even worse. When I had my 6870 and couldn't play it on my PC because of the ATI stutter issue, I went back to my 360 to play it and the fps was so bad that I'd rather go back to the stutter on my PC. Where I notice the console fps problems the most is driving - when I drive at high speeds and steer in any direction it feels very lagged. PC is so superior when you find the right settings.
 
voorhees1979 said:
Maybe that was my issue before with my Q6600, I had settings higher then the xbox had. I am OK now I can play it very well with new setup, but what settings on the PC version would need to be selected to be an exact copy of the 360? I take it the 360 is also locked at 30fps?
Click to expand...

The 360 struggles to get near 30fps with equivalent settings of view distance around 20, detail 10, vehicle 30, textures medium and render low @ 1280 x 720.
 
Turn off the video / frame capture / wtf its called - with this option off, my rig eats GTA4, with it on, it behaves as the OP describes.
 
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