GTA IV for PC (official)

By alphaomegainfinity
in PC Gaming

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Grand Master

Dysphoria

Posted
Posted
Indeed. GTA: San Andreas was fun on the PS2 and even more fun on the PC. I literally spent hours and hours playing that game. I just never got bored of it. Heck, I'd play it right now if I still had it. Hopefully, I'll soon say the same about GTA IV.

What a coincidence. GTA IV runs on Natural Motion's Euphoria animation engine. Hence your alias, hahaha.

Well I guess that's why is running so smooth on my PC ;)

Grand Master

Xerino

Posted
Posted
Sounds like it needs a DeLorean with 1.22jigawatts!!!!

that's 1.21 jigawats!!!! with 1.22 you might overload it, then youll be stuck there.

on another note, I think Ill be sticking with my trusty PS3 for GTA4... my rig is no where near good enough for that behemoth

Grand Master

Dysphoria

Posted
Posted
Not in the Steam version apparently, you need to be online there to save.

Hmm I do have the Steam version....

To clarify one thing: I am logged in Microsoft Live but I am not logged in to Rockstar's Social Club...

Loggin in to R* Social Club crashes the game.

I am not sure but maybe you can save the games only by connecting to MS Live.

Grand Master

Nagisan

Posted
Posted
Yes, steam version has SecuROM too. I found a way around my problem, just had to disconnect the Internet while playing, which also means no saving :rolleyes: Oh well, got to try the game and so far so good.

Whats your system specs?

I cant stand playing games lower than my monitors max resolution (1920x1200) and will gladly sacrifice texture quality and shadows over lowering the resolution, but at the same time I want to get decent FPS, I know my CPU can handle it, but I am unsure if my 4850 can keep up (at 1920x1200). Either way I will be upgrading in January, but I am hoping to find out around what my current computer can handle before I run out and get the game.

Grand Master

Sethos

Posted
Posted
Whats your system specs?

I cant stand playing games lower than my monitors max resolution (1920x1200) and will gladly sacrifice texture quality and shadows over lowering the resolution, but at the same time I want to get decent FPS, I know my CPU can handle it, but I am unsure if my 4850 can keep up (at 1920x1200). Either way I will be upgrading in January, but I am hoping to find out around what my current computer can handle before I run out and get the game.

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

4GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz

8800 Ultra - Factory Overclocked

Windows XP SP3

I usually can't stand it either but the different between the two resolutions are for me, almost unnoticeable and I'd glad play at a lower res to get 40+ FPS.

Grand Master

Nagisan

Posted
Posted
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

4GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz

8800 Ultra - Factory Overclocked

Windows XP SP3

I usually can't stand it either but the different between the two resolutions are for me, almost unnoticeable and I'd glad play at a lower res to get 40+ FPS.

I just hate it throwing everything over to the side, with a 1920x1200 desktop res on 2 different monitors, I dont run my browser full screen, so if a game does not run at my desktop resolution, my browser always gets shifted to the right (even if its minimized) and I always have to reposition it when I get out of the game.

That being said, it seems the 8800 Ultra is virtually the same as the 4850 in terms of performance (I have the TOXIC edition, which is also factory overclocked), I have my processor clocked at 3.7Ghz so that should be an issue.....same amount of ram, but faster (1000Mhz). Are those all the settings that you can change or do they have things like shadow quality and what not? I personally am not a huge graphic guy (I value gameplay over graphics) so as I mentioned above, I dont mind sacrificing quality as long as I can get good performance at 1920x1200.

Either way, thanks for the info, I should be able to handle it pretty well after turning some more settings down, heck, after looking at your dynamic shadows screenshot, the graphics look good enough with what yours are set to that they probably wont look much worse by knocking them down a notch.

Grand Master

Sethos

Posted
Posted

Well, I doubt you can directly compare our hardware like you're doing. So much hardware perform differently in each situation. There is also a lot of talk about most ATi cards struggling with the game, whether it be a driver or an optimization issue, I don't know. So doubt we can compare it like this :)

As I said earlier, there are a lot of steps in the various settings but the differences are really unnoticeable at times. You can change the settings In-game and see the changes on the fly through the transparent background and then you quickly notice the various setting differences. Like, Render Quality High looks exactly the same as Very High and Highest in the few areas I tried changing it, apart from a 'stitch' in the middle of the road which is visible at lower settings.

So even with everything at the lowest setting, the game still looks quite decent, almost on par with the console version. So no need to worry, the game will look great under any circumstances :)

Oh and here are all the available settings you can tweak;

vwyd6b.png

Grand Master

Nagisan

Posted
Posted

Good info, and yes I know you cant really compare even similar hardware, but it gives a basis of what can usually be expected.

Chances are I will turn view distance down a bit (from what you have it on), as well as shadow density.

Either way, I'll likely run it on 1920x1200, chances are the game was optimized for nVidia cards.....nearly all large software companies that deal with anything 3D optimize their graphics for one manufacturer or another. (Unigraphics for example, is more optimized towards nVidia cards than ATI)

Oh well, at least I'm lucky enough (compared to many other people) to be able to have a system right now that can at least handle running the game.

Grand Master

Yusuf M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

I found this screenshot on the web while looking for GTA IV benchmarks:

GTAIV2008-12-0218-28-39-84.jpg

Roughly 1.5 GB in resource usage just to max out the game at 1680x1050 seems a little too much. There's talk on the Internet that this game is chock-full of performance issues.

Experienced

bobbytomorow

Posted
Posted

Damn I was looking forward to getting this but if people are struggling to get 50fps with 8800 Ultra's with quad cores, yikes. Might bypass this for a couple of months to see if some patches resolve these performance issues because lets be honest here its no Crysis, and those of us with decent rigs shouldn't have a problem cranking this game.

Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

I was all ready to buy this game until I read about the performance issues, Hope I wouldn't have to run it at 800x600 with everything on low just to get an ok framerate out of my 8600GT (512MB)

$50 on steam here in Australia and at Eb Games it's $100, seriously what about the people who can't download it on steam because its 14gb and need to buy it, they will need to pay double.

$50USD translates to $77AUD or so, Still around $20 cheaper.

Experienced

bobbytomorow

Posted
Posted
at 13.5 gb...no wonder this game runs so badly..sounds like it is unoptimized to me

Yup, sloppy porting imo. Think about it the 360 and PS3 only have 512MB of RAM and old ass gpu's.

Its almost like there is a conspiracy against PC gaming to get all of us to commit to console gaming because thats where all the money is as fas as devs and publishers are concerned, guaranteed returns and ms/sony help pay for advertising and dev cost.

I know that sounds a little tin foil hattish but seriously whats with these games that can run on far inferior hardware yet have trouble on high end gaming rigs?

Anyone else thought this?

Grand Master

Ci7

Posted
Posted
I found this screenshot on the web while looking for GTA IV benchmarks:

GTAIV2008-12-0218-28-39-84.jpg

Roughly 1.5 GB in resource usage just to max out the game at 1680x1050 seems a little too much. There's talk on the Internet that this game is chock-full of performance issues.

it will improve the sales of 2GB equipped graphic card ahaha

and why the hell it doesn't just use system ram for textures ??

Grand Master

Elliot B.

Posted
Posted
it will improve the sales of 2GB equipped graphic card ahaha

and why the hell it doesn't just use system ram for textures ??

'cause that is what VRAM is for. Plus, VRAM is faster than RAM I believe.

Grand Master

Unimatrix Xero

Posted
Posted (edited)

right, playing in offline mode didnt work, and ive found something interesting, the game is not saving my graphical options its always defaulting to 1680x1050 and a insane setting where i get 20 fps

ive tried setting it in the main menu saving and then quiting, then running the game again, but no joy, anyone else got this issue?

EDIT:

after lowering my settings down to the following (see pic) the game is STILL running like crap

http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/1712/gtaje3.jpg

Edited by Unimatrix Xero
Grand Master

Yusuf M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted
it will improve the sales of 2GB equipped graphic card ahaha

and why the hell it doesn't just use system ram for textures ??

Video RAM is not only faster, but different. It acts as a frame buffer between the CPU and GPU. It's also dual ported meaning that it can send information to the processor and read/update new information at the same time. As far as I know, that's the main difference between regular system RAM and video RAM.

Anyway, I've yet to play GTA IV on the PC. I'm afraid it won't run as well as I'd like it to. I sincerely hope Rockstar North releases a patch to fix any or all of the performance issues as well as the various bugs reported so far. Seriously, if it can run on console hardware from 2005/2006 then it should sure as hell run on computer hardware from 2008.

Grand Master

Unimatrix Xero

Posted
Posted

well after a little tinkering ive found a command line via a shortcut that helps me a little but i still feel i shouldnt have to do this on my system, but hey

simply create a shortcut and use the following line "M:\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -width 1280 -height 1024 -shadowdensity 0 -viewdistance 10 -texturequality 0 -renderquality 0 -detailquality 10 , you will need to change the folder location but it should help until something better comes out

Grand Master

-KJ

Posted
Posted
at 13.5 gb...no wonder this game runs so badly..sounds like it is unoptimized to me....look at farcry2...2.5gb and huge worlds...destructible environment..etc..

Uh, I'm no PC gamer but aren't the new GTA IV texture resolutions higher now? That could mean a bigger filesize and I'm sure that there are MANY more textures (indoors, outdoors, cars, people, buildings, etc) in GTA IV than compared to FarCry 2 (at least what I've seen of it... open land, many reusable textures). And there's the radio and the diverse environmental sounds in GTA IV which should also take up some more space than when compared to FC2.

Of course, I haven't played FC2 but only seen a few videos, so I should shut up. 13.5GB vs 2.5GB is still big.

Grand Master

Japlabot

Posted
Posted

I was hoping that I would be able to play it on a Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz T7400/2GB RAM/X1600 Radeon 128MB (Not too bad for gaming) but I am doubtful that it will play very well on something midrange, when not even high end PCs in 2008 can handle it. I think that I will wait until the Core i7 and whatever GeForce that they are up becomes mainstream before considering to get this on PC.

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried to play this on one of the new MacBook Pros (Geforce 9600M GT 512MB / 2.53GHz C2D T9400 / 4GB 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM)? :D

I also wouldn't mind a Demo version so that I can test the performance first.

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