GTA IV PC Benchmarks

[ManCannon]

I'm amazed how quickly and how often I see people format their machines at the drop of a hat and most of the time it just isn't necessary.

I don't do it often at all, but it seemed like something was bad wrong with my performance, and I'd tried everything else so I gave it a shot. Personally, I like to format every once in a while anyway, I have a tendency to let things get very disorganized so it's nice to have a fresh start.

All true, although what kind of settings are you really trying to run?

The settings I said. I've tried everything, but even at 1200x800 with everything on low and all the sliders literally set to 1 or 0, I still couldn't maintain 30 fps.

although if you set the thing right it really doesn't take much to see where this pretty much blows the console versions out of the water.

Well, explain to me how to set the thing right. I'm dying to see even halfway decent performance. And I fail to see how it could come close to blowing the 360 version out of the water when it doesn't even support AA. Even when I tried to run it 1920x1200 it was jaggy city.

 

[Q-BZ]

I don't do it often at all, but it seemed like something was bad wrong with my performance, and I'd tried everything else so I gave it a shot. Personally, I like to format every once in a while anyway, I have a tendency to let things get very disorganized so it's nice to have a fresh start.

The settings I said. I've tried everything, but even at 1200x800 with everything on low and all the sliders literally set to 1 or 0, I still couldn't maintain 30 fps.



Well, explain to me how to set the thing right. I'm dying to see even halfway decent performance. And I fail to see how it could come close to blowing the 360 version out of the water when it doesn't even support AA. Even when I tried to run it 1920x1200 it was jaggy city.

When all else fails, use the auto config choice and work off of there. You want to see the numbers at the bottom be green.

The slider that affects them the most is viewing distance. Manually click that setting downwards until the moment you see green.

The settings and rendering settings don't seem to affect those numbers much, either. You could probably max those out and see what happens.

Your rig in your sig really should not be seeing this kind of poor performance you are talking about.

Make sure all drivers and such are up to date which I suspect you've done.

Google "GTAIV graphic settings" and the very first link is a PDF file with some guidance that might shed more light for you.

 

[ManCannon]

When all else fails, use the auto config choice and work off of there. You want to see the numbers at the bottom be green.

The slider that affects them the most is viewing distance. Manually click that setting downwards until the moment you see green.

The settings and rendering settings don't seem to affect those numbers much, either. You could probably max those out and see what happens.

Your rig in your sig really should not be seeing this kind of poor performance you are talking about.

Make sure all drivers and such are up to date which I suspect you've done.

Google "GTAIV graphic settings" and the very first link is a PDF file with some guidance that might shed more light for you.

Trust me, I've tried tons of combinations of settings. From auto-configure, to everything set to low, to everything set to high, to everything inbetween. Nothing makes a difference. I tried turning Vsync off through the commandline, I tried putting in norestrictions, I've changed sound and video drivers, did a fresh install with all the latest drivers. Nothing has changed the performance, the game is unplayable no matter what combination of settings I use and what drivers I have.

At 1280x800 with everything on low I get like 25 fps average if I'm lucky. At 1920x1200 with everything on high I get like 17 fps average. It blows my mind that such a huge drop in my settings only nets me like 8 frames.

With the auto-configure, at the start of the game, after getting to the safehouse and doing my first mission to meet up with Roman it goes something like this:

Inside the Safe house: 55 fps
Step outside the safe house: 25 fps
Go down the stairs: 20 fps
Shot of the hot dog vendor: 15 fps
Steal a car and drive around: 18 fps

The only place I can stay above 30 fps after leaving the safe house is on the beach, looking out to sea. I can get 60 fps solid if I stand in the sand and look at the water. If I turn around and look at the city, bam, sub-30 fps. In fact, if I walk backward and get near the city my framerate starts to dive. I don't even have to look at it.

 

[altcon]

I'll just note my impressions of the game.
I'm running a min Spec machine.
At the suggested "auto config" settings the game chugs along at 12FPS, after about 3 minutes of play I'm missing so many textures the world looks a see through box with light poles juxtaposed here and there.
I go into the settings and revert to maximum pessimism - all low, all settings at the absolute zero. My rig now hauls 25FPS and dips into the high teens.
After 20 minutes of play some textures fail to load, some scripts fail to execute so I can't complete missions and all in all I give up.
Folks this game is not pretty enough, complex enough or enough fun to warrant the absolutely horrid performance we're getting.
The game world s still as ugly as it was in GTA3 plus some minor improvements, the characters certainly look better, but mostly in cut scenes and the framerates are just abysmal.
This has got to be the worst port EVER and it feels like RockStar really took a piss on PC Gamers. I for one want my 55$ back.

 

[Frostex]

Some of you badly need to upgrade your CPUs

The MINIMUM specs is a Core2Duo dual core, the recommended is a Core2Duo quad at 2.4Ghz

Honestly this info was available on launch day...minimum spec means the hardware you need for the game to function correctly, the recommended spec is the hardware they believe you'll get a good gaming experience with.

Its running nice and smooth for me with vsync forced off, on a [email protected] and 4870 xfire, 4gb ram setup, 1920x1200 is fine with medium textures (set because my video cards only have 512mb mem) and most of the sliders around 30 which is way above the consoles, I'm getting a decent frame rate which is always above 30fps even in firefights and large chases etc, the game looks fantastic.

If you dont want to upgrade may I suggest a PS3 or something, where you can play it in 1137x640 with low video settings which is more suited for your gaming budget.

 

[Ron FTL]

Trust me, I've tried tons of combinations of settings. From auto-configure, to everything set to low, to everything set to high, to everything inbetween. Nothing makes a difference. I tried turning Vsync off through the commandline, I tried putting in norestrictions, I've changed sound and video drivers, did a fresh install with all the latest drivers. Nothing has changed the performance, the game is unplayable no matter what combination of settings I use and what drivers I have.

At 1280x800 with everything on low I get like 25 fps average if I'm lucky. At 1920x1200 with everything on high I get like 17 fps average. It blows my mind that such a huge drop in my settings only nets me like 8 frames.

With the auto-configure, at the start of the game, after getting to the safehouse and doing my first mission to meet up with Roman it goes something like this:

Inside the Safe house: 55 fps
Step outside the safe house: 25 fps
Go down the stairs: 20 fps
Shot of the hot dog vendor: 15 fps
Steal a car and drive around: 18 fps

The only place I can stay above 30 fps after leaving the safe house is on the beach, looking out to sea. I can get 60 fps solid if I stand in the sand and look at the water. If I turn around and look at the city, bam, sub-30 fps. In fact, if I walk backward and get near the city my framerate starts to dive. I don't even have to look at it.

Bro. I get the exact same crap with my rig.

AMD X2 6000+ @ 3.2ghz

Even on the rock bottom lowest setting.
800x600
texture quality LOW
Render quality: LOW
view distance: 0
detail distance:0
traffic density:0
shadows: 0

I benchmark at 39fps. But when I actually play the game with those exact rock bottom lowest settings I still get 17-18fps driving. Seriously ridiculous.

Fresh install of Vista x64

and I DONT consider my CPU to be outdated at all. It is very comparable to a core2duo.
and my whole system is well above the minimum spec to run the game. Why is it borderline unplayable?

Right now. It is hard for me to enjoy the game no matter what settings I play it on.
Shoot even if I could run it at the lowest settings I will play it, but I can't. It gets so choppy at time. All I want is to be able to play the game.

I wish they made it similar to crysis. As there would be a super ultra high option for next gen PC's and then a Low option for last gen PC's that can actually run the game.

 

[ManCannon]

Some of you badly need to upgrade your CPUs

The MINIMUM specs is a Core2Duo dual core, the recommended is a Core2Duo quad at 2.4Ghz

Honestly this info was available on launch day...minimum spec means the hardware you need for the game to function correctly, the recommended spec is the hardware they believe you'll get a good gaming experience with.

Its running nice and smooth for me with vsync forced off, on a [email protected] and 4870 xfire, 4gb ram setup, 1920x1200 is fine with medium textures (set because my video cards only have 512mb mem) and most of the sliders around 30 which is way above the consoles, I'm getting a decent frame rate which is always above 30fps even in firefights and large chases etc, the game looks fantastic.

If you dont want to upgrade may I suggest a PS3 or something, where you can play it in 1137x640 with low video settings which is more suited for your gaming budget.

How about you take your elitist bullshit elsewhere?

There's absolutely no excuse for the performance of this port. My rig might not be top of the line, but it's run every other game out there, including the monster that is Crysis, at high settings with very respectable performance.

This game is no Crysis, not technically and certainly not visually, yet it can't even maintain a halfway decent framerate at settings that are about half of what I run Crysis at. Even when I set everything to high, at 1920x1200 it still doesn't look half as good as Crysis and it runs half as good as well.

There is no excuse for a console port of a game that runs with 2xAA on 3 year old console hardware to run this poorly on any relatively recent gaming PC. All other 360 ports have run ridiculously well, Assassin's Creed, Dead Space, GRiD, PURE, all of them at 1920x1200 with high settings, completely playable.

I'm not seeing anything in this game that's far enough ahead of everything else to justify the performance. Crysis has a full jungle and every last palm frond reacts realistically. It has destructible buildings, destructible vegetation, and WAY more graphical effects going on. So instead of telling everyone to go out and buy new computers, why don't you tell Rockstar to learn how to make a decent port? I've been reading a lot about this, and it seems this port was handed to the same studio that did the Bully port job, another notoriously demanding port that brings system's to their knees despite being designed around last-gen technology.

Honestly, I think ever last person involved in this farce should be fired. Anyone who had a part in making this godawful piece of shit has no business making videogames. But hey, that's just me. Maybe that's a little harsh, but maybe not.

 

[Frostex]

How about you take your elitist bullshit elsewhere?

There's absolutely no excuse for the performance of this port. My rig might not be top of the line, but it's run every other game out there

Until someone comes up with a better, and more coherent argument for any significant lack of optimisation I don't care.

You do understand that you saying "it doesn't run well for me therefore it must be unoptimised" is just as meaningless as me saying "it runs fine for me so it must be optimised"

I'm perfectly willing to believe this game is badly optimised if someone can provide some proof that this is the case, I'm sorry but making a claim then just asserting your opinion on the subject doesn't qualify as a coherent argument.

This is all pride and e-peen hurt, its the exact same thing that we saw with crysis, people spend some money on a rig and a short while later it can't play with everything on "ultra" or "max" and suddenly everyone and their dog has something to whine about, but no coherent argument to actually back it up...

Welcome to PC gaming, games improve over time and the hardware requirements go up, get used to it or buy a console and play the game in 1137x640 with low everything.

 

[ManCannon]

I've read pages and pages of impressions from four different forums, and I've seen people with rigs that easily eclipse mine also having performance issues.

Hell, I saw a guy with a Q9550 and GTX280's in SLi talking about how he was dropping into the low 20's at 1680x1050. I've seen people with wildly overclocked E8400's paired with equally competent cards bitching about their performance. These aren't isolated incidents either, I've read literally dozens upon dozens of discussing the abysmal performance of this port.

The fact of the matter is the game performs terribly for what it has on offer. There's nothing all that advanced being displayed here, and it's ridiculous that very competent gaming rigs can't even match what a 3 year old Xbox 360 can do. I'm glad you think your performance is perfectly acceptable, but I think an OC'ed Quad Core and two 4870's should eat this game for breakfast, not have to bump down to medium textures and run the sliders at 1/3 of the way up. And just think, even with your massively powerful PC, that you undoubtedly paid a nice chunk of change for, you can't even enable 2xAA while everyone who played it on a 360 had that standard.

You're asking me to prove that the game is unoptimized, but considering how prevalent the problems are, I think the burden of proof lies on you. If you can link me to some articles that explain just how much more advanced this game is than Crysis, so much so that it performs literally half as good, then I'll concede the point. Until then, I'll again ask you to take your elitist bullshit elsewhere. Comments like "If you dont want to upgrade may I suggest a PS3 or something, where you can play it in 1137x640 with low video settings which is more suited for your gaming budget" are condescending and rude, and you know it.

 

[mr_zen256]

I just played multi-player for hours..........

What a fantastic game. There are so many different types of multiplayer modes, the maps are huge, and the possibilities are endless.

Fantastic.

If Rockstar were to fully concentrate on the PC, and make the consoles an afterthought.... GTA could become one of the premier PC multiplayer games. It has tremendous potential.

(well, maybe not make the consoles an afterthought - but put WAY more time into PC development)

I just got into the multiplayer yesterday and man, it is 10 times cooler than the actual game lol.. My favourite game modes are cops & crooks, GTA Race and having kick ass helicopter battles in free form mode. It really is a blast to play online, it's just a shame not many people seemed to be on when I was playing.

Seriously.. The helicopter battles are just too fun

 

[Frostex]

I've read pages and pages of impressions from four different forums, and I've seen people with rigs that easily eclipse mine also having performance issues.

Hell, I saw a guy with a Q9550 and GTX280's in SLi talking about how he was dropping into the low 20's at 1680x1050. I've seen people with wildly overclocked E8400's paired with equally competent cards bitching about their performance. These aren't isolated incidents either, I've read literally dozens upon dozens of discussing the abysmal performance of this port.

Too little information, we can't confirm any legitimate problems on these PC's, the rest of the settings used in the game, things like Vsync set, problems with overclocking, bad installs and about a trillion other problems.

The fact of the matter is the game performs terribly for what it has on offer.

I'm sorry that's not a fact.

There's nothing all that advanced being displayed here

Maybe not, but the scale is beyond that of almost all other games, and the content is incredibly varied with many unique textures and models.

and it's ridiculous that very competent gaming rigs can't even match what a 3 year old Xbox 360 can do.

The Xbox360 runs in the laughable resolution of 1280x720 with most of the sliders and effects on low, probably with no filtering and pretty rocky frame rates to begin with.

Just to run with the same low settings and same rocky frame rate but in 1680x1050 you need approximately twice the rendering power since it contains about twice as many pixels as 1280x720 does, this also means filtering effects are a bigger hit to the video card any any other pixel shaders which scale with the number of pixels.

I'm glad you think your performance is perfectly acceptable, but I think an OC'ed Quad Core and two 4870's should eat this game for breakfast, not have to bump down to medium textures and run the sliders at 1/3 of the way up.

Its running medium textures because the 4870s sport a rather laughable 512mb of video memory and high res textures need lots of memory, theres no real argument to be had there, the texture need as much space as they need, I'm perfectly happy to run the game at < 512mb of memory until i can afford to pick up some higher memory video cards.

The sliders are arbitrary values, theres no inherent value behind graphics sliders, its completely picked by the developers, saying 1/3 sliders on it's own doesn't mean anything, the game happens to look bloody brilliant at 1/3 sliders, the developers confirmed the console settings were way below 1/3.

And just think, even with your massively powerful PC, that you undoubtedly paid a nice chunk of change for, you can't even enable 2xAA while everyone who played it on a 360 had that standard.

ATI and Nvidia will soon see to that I expect, same happens with a lot of other games.

You're asking me to prove that the game is unoptimized, but considering how prevalent the problems are, I think the burden of proof lies on you.

I'm not making any claims here, people are saying the game is unopimtised blah blah blah, I'm simply asking for people to make an argument for this position, if no decent argument can be made then why the hell should I believe it, why should anyone believe it?

If you can link me to some articles that explain just how much more advanced this game is than Crysis, so much so that it performs literally half as good, then I'll concede the point. Until then, I'll again ask you to take your elitist bullshit elsewhere.

Nothing doing, It's not my job to disprove your point but rather your job to prove it. I'm not the one making any claims here, I'm simply chosing not to believe this rampant mouth flapping until somoene can make a good argument for it

Comments like "If you dont want to upgrade may I suggest a PS3 or something, where you can play it in 1137x640 with low video settings which is more suited for your gaming budget" are condescending and rude, and you know it.

Consoles are cheaper and have significantly less hardware power. They're best suited for people who seem unwilling/unable to provide decent hardware, or people who lack the understanding to not alter the settings to be too high for their configurations. It seems logical to appy that to people who are moaning.

 

[krupted]

argh- as said,

X2 CHIPS WILL NOT GIVE YOU >30FPS IN GTAIV!

period. on average im saying. my opteron 165 isnt even playable unless i overclock it to 2.7ghz with my 8800gts g92, and even then its not the most fun.

if you have a 8800gt or better video card, an x2 is holding you back anyway. you want to play gta 4 correctly? you need an equivalent to a core2 duo at least- no matter what your video card is. END OF STORY.

btw- the latest nvidia drivers and the new gta patch DOES help quite a bit in performance, but the above is still very true.

 

[altcon]

I'll sum it up shortly, for a bad looking POS that offers NO NEW FEATURES over many more advanced racing games, RPGs and first person shooters, the performance reflects lack of time spent on optimizing the game.

If you compare games like Grid, Far Cry2, Fallout3, Crysis, Assasins Creed and many other games out lately a couple of options come to mind:

1) RockStar are mediocre programmers, and they don't have the experience to deliver such an aspiring game in an optimal way

2) Time and budget constraints forced their hand

3) They don't give a shit about the PC gaming community

All of the above are fine, BUT they should've put the Recommended System as the MInimum one (It would have saved me money).

The game is unplayable at the lowest setting on their Min Spec system.
If other games gave me similar results at 1280*1024 (which is my native Res), I would consider my PC obsolete.

Alas, every game I've bought (including Crysis) ran fine on my rig at Medium to High settings, with better visuals, better physics, more complex characters, smarter AI, better scripting and longer distance draw so I have to conclude...
ROCKSTAR FUCKED US WITH A POS PORT.
I feel silly considering a CoreI7 for this game....
I'd like my 55$ back and my wasted time you clowns, If I delivered any crap like that on my Job - I'd be job Hunting!

 

[mr_zen256]

In regards to AA, that would make a huge difference in performance. At the moment I'm running in 2560 x 1600 as anything less and the jaggies are unbearable. If AA gets implemented I could then drop the res down to 1680 x 1050 with 4x or maybe even 8x AA taking a bit of the strain off the CPU and putting the GPU to work.

 

[ManCannon]

I'm sorry that's not a fact.

It certainly is. It is a fact that it performs terribly on MANY PC's, PC's that are more than adequate and run every other game on the market at high settings.

Maybe not, but the scale is beyond that of almost all other games

The scale isn't even half of that of San Andreas, a game that ran perfectly fine on the PS2. It may have some new bells and whistles and some extra physics calculations, but in the my play time I've seen nothing I would consider a large leap over San Andreas, and in fact there are many downgrades.

The Xbox360 runs in the laughable resolution of 1280x720 with most of the sliders and effects on low, probably with no filtering and pretty rocky frame rates to begin with.

Just to run with the same low settings and same rocky frame rate but in 1680x1050 you need approximately twice the rendering power since it contains about twice as many pixels as 1280x720 does, this also means filtering effects are a bigger hit to the video card any any other pixel shaders which scale with the number of pixels.

And yet, every other halfway decent 360 port in existence runs flawlessly at 1920x1200 with AA and AF. Assassin's Creed, a game quite comparable to GTAIV, that to my eye has better graphics in many instances, ran perfectly for me. Didn't much care for the gameplay, but it ran very well. Far Cry 2, another large open world game with vehicles, weather patterns, and plenty of physics calculations, that for my money looks a lot better than GTAIV, ran at 1920x1200 with all high settings no problem on my computer. Played it for hours and never once did my framerate dip to a point where I felt it affected my ability to play the game.

The sliders are arbitrary values, theres no inherent value behind graphics sliders, its completely picked by the developers, saying 1/3 sliders on it's own doesn't mean anything, the game happens to look bloody brilliant at 1/3 sliders, the developers confirmed the console settings were way below 1/3.

The sliders have a value in comparison to their whole. You're running the game at 1/3 of it's capabilities. It doesn't matter if the difference between one third and the whole shebang is two extra cars on the screen and ten more feet of view distance or if it's 50 more cars and an extra mile, the point is that you're using $500 worth of GPU power, twice the price of a 360 on it's own, to run the game at a third of it's potential.

I'm not making any claims here, people are saying the game is unopimtised blah blah blah, I'm simply asking for people to make an argument for this position, if no decent argument can be made then why the hell should I believe it, why should anyone believe it?

You absolutely are making claims.

I contend, as well as many others, that the game is a poorly optimized shitty port job. Your contention is that it is not. You are claiming that it is not a poor port.

This isn't a court of law, a game isn't innocent until proven guilty. In fact, there's far more evidence that the game is a poorly optimized port than there is otherwise. The only way we can really be certain of anything is to look at the facts:

1. The game runs poorly in comparison to other games. That is an undeniable fact.

2. The Studio that handled this port, Rockstar Toronto has almost no history making PC games or ports.

3. Many people with very nice PC's are having terrible performance related woes. From generally poor performance, to memory leaks, to crashing, to texture corruption and pop-in. You can blame this all on user error if you like, but that's just ignorant in my opinion.

What evidence do you have? That the game runs pretty well on your OC'ED Quad Core and two top of the line GPU's with medium settings at 1/3rd of it's potential? Anything else?

They're best suited for people who seem unwilling/unable to provide decent hardware, or people who lack the understanding to not alter the settings to be too high for their configurations. It seems logical to appy that to people who are moaning.

And here's your elitist mentality shining through again. Everyone who's having problems must be a moron who's trying to push their PC beyond it's limits, and they should just buy consoles because they're obviously too stupid for PC gaming.

Unbelievable.

 

[cvinh]

Great points on your side ManCannon. I will stay away from this port until a decent patch comes out. If the game can't even provide playable fps at recommended specs then I'm going to avoid it.

 

[Frostex]

It certainly is. It is a fact that it performs terribly on MANY PC's, PC's that are more than adequate and run every other game on the market at high settings.

Re-asserting your opinion doesn't make something fact, no matter how many times you do it.

The scale isn't even half of that of San Andreas, a game that ran perfectly fine on the PS2. It may have some new bells and whistles and some extra physics calculations, but in the my play time I've seen nothing I would consider a large leap over San Andreas, and in fact there are many downgrades.

The scale is less than San Andreas but the detail is far greater, there LOD is much more harsh showing more detailed textures at greater distance, there is also many objects including all the vehicles which have real time physics applied to them, the game overall is just much higher quality than San Andreas from pretty much any technical standpoint be that texture resolutions more unique meshes, greater detail to models, shadows, particle effects etc.

And yet, every other halfway decent 360 port in existence runs flawlessly at 1920x1200 with AA and AF. Assassin's Creed, a game quite comparable to GTAIV, that to my eye has better graphics in many instances, ran perfectly for me. Didn't much care for the gameplay, but it ran very well. Far Cry 2, another large open world game with vehicles, weather patterns, and plenty of physics calculations, that for my money looks a lot better than GTAIV, ran at 1920x1200 with all high settings no problem on my computer. Played it for hours and never once did my framerate dip to a point where I felt it affected my ability to play the game.

Most of the "performance issues" are with the CPU and not the GPU, and thats because GTA4 has a much greater demand on physics and AI compared to games like assassins creed and Far Cry 2, in fact Far Cry 2 is not even close in comparison, it has 1-2 vehicles about at most with only handful of AI controlled enemies.

The sliders have a value in comparison to their whole.

Yes, however their "whole" is arbitrary and decided by the developers. This is the EXACT same problem as with view sliders and other sliding scale values that we saw with games like oblivion and Crysis where people epeen defence kicks in and they complain they cant set the sliders to max, or can "only" set them 1/2 way.

The developers could have easily have set 1/3rds to be the max setting and had a sliding scale between 0 and 33 instead, but what is the point to just please people who have epeen problems? Why not leave that scale much more open ended as they did with Crysis and allow future hardware (or enthusiats with decent PCs) the ability to run the game with even greater detail.

Oh wah wah wah we can't set it at max boo hoo, instead of saying "well the view distance doesn't look all that great when set to 33" and making a valid argument about the pay off of the view distance and the detail in it and comparing that to the slider people just fire off their usual baby cries of how the sliders are ONLY at X or ONLY at Z, but if you take the time to research you'll find thats a damn sight bigger than what the xbox runs (being used for comparison here and elsewhere) so in fact 33 (or 35) is actually fairly high in comparison, and in you take 20 secodns to look in game, actually is pretty damn far.

You're running the game at 1/3 of it's capabilities. It doesn't matter if the difference between one third and the whole shebang is two extra cars on the screen and ten more feet of view distance or if it's 50 more cars and an extra mile, the point is that you're using $500 worth of GPU power, twice the price of a 360 on it's own, to run the game at a third of it's potential.

Again the "potential" is set by the developers as an arbitrary point, they've picked some value which is just "large" and you can set a value anywhere on a sliding scale between that, they could have easily have made the scale for number of cars start at 0 and move up to a billion cars, and when you can only set 0.0000001% on that scale is that a huge problem?

Again I will reiterate that this is an epeen problem, people see a slider and naturally they want MAX because they've spent $500 on a PC or $1000 on a PC or some large number and the natural reaction when you can't have "max" or "large" on that scale is to get pissed off.

I hope some of you can begin to see that this is not a coherent argument, saying that 1/3 of an arbitrary scale isn't using something to its max potential, without understanding what that scale means.

I bet a great deal of you dont even realise that the view scale slider isn't even a linear one in comparison to performance. It's a bit like the area of a circle as the radius increases, the area doesnt increase proportional to the radius. In game this means it takes many more times the rendering power to get just twice the view distance.

So while the viewscale is a linear slider the performance against that slider isn't a linear one and it costs you more rendering time per increase on that slider depending on how far you are up it. Consoles run on a view distance of 22 according to rockstar, that means a view distance of 35 in my example is many times greater

If we assume the viewing angles of the arc are the same, and we're just bothered with relative area (percentage increase) we could just dump those numbers into the area of a circle to get the relative size, (Pi R^2) thats 22^2 * 3.141 = 1,520 units squared compared to 3,848 correct to 3dp, thats a factor increase of 250% the area being drawn and on average 250% more objects, assuming the max of that scale is 100 which im fairly sure it is, then thats 2000% more than the consoles, more objects being draw.

Some of you need some perspective and to think about this a little harder, boo hoo i only get 250% more area being drawn on the PC than the console, its not enough waaah

You absolutely are making claims.

Where? What claims? A load of people are whinng and I'm saying I dont accept that because theres no decent coherent argument to back it up (at least so far)

Not accepting your claims doesn't mean Im making the opposite claim myself, at the moment Im fairly neutral on the situation, it appears to run well for me for what I see on screen (which is a lot) and it's yet to be seen if other people have slow performance for other reasons, for example we know by rockstars own admission that SLI does not work (scale)

I contend, as well as many others, that the game is a poorly optimized shitty port job. Your contention is that it is not. You are claiming that it is not a poor port.

WRONG, I dont claim it's not badly optimised, I simply dismiss peoples claims because they don't bring to the table a sufficient arugment for me to believe them. I've have stated several times in multiple GTA4 performance discussion threads that im happy to believe the game is badly opimised if someone can demonstrate a reason other than "it doesnt run well on my PC"

This isn't a court of law, a game isn't innocent until proven guilty. In fact, there's far more evidence that the game is a poorly optimized port than there is otherwise. The only way we can really be certain of anything is to look at the facts:

1. The game runs poorly in comparison to other games. That is an undeniable fact.

2. The Studio that handled this port, Rockstar Toronto has almost no history making PC games or ports.

3. Many people with very nice PC's are having terrible performance related woes. From generally poor performance, to memory leaks, to crashing, to texture corruption and pop-in. You can blame this all on user error if you like, but that's just ignorant in my opinion.

1. I'd say its an undeniable fact that FC2 runs worse than pong, without a detailed study of exactly what is being drawn on the screen in comparison nothing further meaningful can be infered. GTA4 appears to be incredibly details and set in a very open world which is packed with many unique models and textures (more so than a lot of games)

2. This is just an assumption they'll make a bad port, theres no real logical thinking there.

3. many people with nice PCs have terrible performance related woes with a lot of games, guess what, theres bugs (SLI doesnt work for example) and there maybe other grapics driver issues which are external to the game, there good evidence that ATI and Nvidia increase the average performance of games using appropirate driver tweaks, on a regular basis. Theres also good evidence to show that people who are having performance issues are having them because of the game, maybe vsync is causing artifical drops in performance and people havnt forced it off (this would be the case in a large portion of players since theres no easy to way to disable vsync in the game without using executable switches)

What evidence do you have? That the game runs pretty well on your OC'ED Quad Core and two top of the line GPU's with medium settings at 1/3rd of it's potential? Anything else?

Evidence for what? Again im not saying the game is perfectly optimised, Ive never made such a claim, im simply asking those people flapping their mouths about unopimisation to actually provide some kind of coherent argument to support such claims, until they do I have no reason to believe such claims, especially since the game runs well and looks great on my PC

And here's your elitist mentality shining through again. Everyone who's having problems must be a moron who's trying to push their PC beyond it's limits, and they should just buy consoles because they're obviously too stupid for PC gaming.

Unbelievable.

I never called anyone a moron, Im suggesting that people who are having problems for whatever reason would be better off with a console beacuse they're simpler to use and more problem free.

Sometimes poor performance is because of a bug with SLI or a setting in the game like vsync which not everyone knows about as its not displayed in the menu, and thats fine because not everyone has their head into PCs and cares to learn enough to work this stuff out, If you dont understand then get a console is definately going to make your life easier, it's just a suggestion!

 

[ManCannon]

Your entire argument is that everyone who's having performance woes in this game, is either too stupid to operate a PC, or has some kind of conflict in their settings that's preventing them from getting good performance? It's not a fact that people are getting poor performance in this game compared to other games with similar structures and level of detail? It certainly is, whether you want to believe it or not.

It seems to me that this whole argument stems from the fact that you refuse to trust anyone on this forum or any other. There are thousands upon thousands of people having performance issues in this game (and that's just the people posting), yet you're asking for evidence that it's a poor port? What more evidence do you need? You can't just take people's word for it, instead you choose to believe that because you're running the game at medium settings on a very powerful PC and not having any issues that everyone else is just full of it. Or that anyone who doesn't have an OC'ed Quad Core and 4870's should just stick to console gaming?

Maybe I could agree with you if it seemed like it was just a vocal minority having problems, but I've seen hundreds of threads with multiple posters all talking about their horrible performance. I would link you to them, but you'd just claim that every one of them doesn't know what they're doing or has some kind of driver level conflict.

And frankly, I don't know why you think this game is so damn advanced, because I don't see anything that hasn't been done before. It has some decent physics, but they're certainly not far ahead of anything else out there.

When it comes right down to it, all I have to say is this:

Far Cry 2: 1920x1200 everything on high 16xAF [playable]
Fallout 3: 1920x1200 with everything maxed 2xAA and 16xAF [playable]
Dead Space: 1920x1200 everything maxed 2xAA and 16xAF [playable]
Assassin's Creed: 1600x1200 everything maxed 2xAA and 16xAF [playable]
GRiD: 1600x1200 everything maxed 4xAA and 16xAF [playable]
Call of Duty 4: 1600x1200 everything maxed 4xAA and 16xAF [playable]
BioShock: 1920x1200 everything maxed 4xAA and 16xAF [playable]
Left 4 Dead: 1920x1200 everything maxed 4xAA and 16xAF [playable]
PURE: 1920x1200 with everything maxed 4xAA and 16xAF [playable]
Crysis: 1600x1200 everything on high and 8xAF [playable]
Grand Theft Auto 4: 1280x800 everything on low and all sliders set to 1 or 0 no AA or AF [unplayable]

That's all the evidence I need that it's a poor port. You can claim it's far more advanced than every last one of those games, you can claim I don't know what I'm doing or whatever else you like, I really don't care. I know it's a shitty port, I've felt it first hand. When a 3 year old console that my PC normally runs rings around with every last game that's been ported can't even maintain 30 fps at less than console settings I don't really need anymore evidence.

 

[Druneau]

After reading a lot I decided to buy the game to see for myself. I was kinda surprised when I got it up and running.

"Auto-Config" put the game at:

1920x1080
Textures Low
Effects Medium

View Distance 22
Detail Distance 32
Vehicle Density 22
Shadow Density 2

I drove around the city for around 30 minutes with fraps and frames were consistently between 30-45. Mostly low 30's. What I was happy about is that there was no jerking around. It was smooth.

Now, the first time I launched the game I already had ATI's 8.12 drivers and the GTAIV patch. So I can't compare...

I'll definitely play the game once I finish a couple of other games I've got going on.

Edit: Vista 64 Bit btw.

 

[defiant007]

Don't worry about Frostex, he is a Rockstar apologist. No matter how shit the game is, he and others like him will have convinced themselves that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that any users complaining about performance/bugginess are outliers. Such is human nature, people do not like admitting to themselves they have wasted money on rubbish, so they convince themselves otherwise.

 

[Q-BZ]

Don't worry about Frostex, he is a Rockstar apologist. No matter how shit the game is, he and others like him will have convinced themselves that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that any users complaining about performance/bugginess are outliers. Such is human nature, people do not like admitting to themselves they have wasted money on rubbish, so they convince themselves otherwise.

On the other hand you have people who have this mental quirk that if the slider is not set to 100, despite clear documentation from Rockstar as to exactly how the settings work, then something is terribly wrong with the game.

There has to be some balance somewhere in between all that.

 

[defiant007]

On the other hand you have people who have this mental quirk that if the slider is not set to 100, despite clear documentation from Rockstar as to exactly how the settings work, then something is terribly wrong with the game.

There has to be some balance somewhere in between all that.

Based on what I have read this is not another crysis syndrome, there is an overwhelming tide of complaints about bugginess and performance from users even with monstrous machines. I agree that internet users can be vocal about such things, but it is not often you see a backlash of these proportions (presently it has a user metacritic rating of 42%).

 

[Q-BZ]

Based on what I have read this is not another crysis syndrome, there is an overwhelming tide of complaints about bugginess and performance from users even with monstrous machines. I agree that internet users can be vocal about such things, but it is not often you see a backlash of these proportions (presently it has a user metacritic rating of 42%).

There's no question this thing was shipped out to meet a deadline and easily could have benefited from probably a few more weeks worth of spit and polish, as it were. I'm lucky it's been running as well as it has for me save for MMA10 and RESC10 fatal error crashes which I've just pretty much learned to live with, which sucks. Fallout 3's constant CTDs has conditioned me well, I suppose.

Unfortunately this sort of thing is just becoming all too common in PC gaming: Rush game out to meet deadline and try patch it up weeks and months later after the fact. It's a terrible, damaging trend that I really wish would die.

It's come to the point that I have to feel lucky when/if I fire up a game and it doesn't have some kind of problem or quirk and that's a bad feeling.

Something like a simultaneous multiplatform Fallout 3 gets a little more latitude than the PC version of GTAIV for one reason: Rockstar has has months to work on this PC version of GTAIV. There's no reason it should have shipped with the issues that it did.

Somewhere in this mix we also have people that are at or too close to minimum specs. I learned a long time ago that if you aren't at least at "recommended specs" with any of these games: Don't bother. Some games are more forgiving than others on that count.

 

[ellover009]

Well I bought it, have not installed it yet, but gonna test it with different setup, waiting a few days maybe the quad2core go on sale.
Only thing I can think of is that they didn't bother to rewrite the game to work well with less than 3 processors. 360 has 3 processors, ps3 has that cell processor running 6+1 (1 is to run the OS only).
There are a few main factors influencing why it runs slow on a fair amount of setups.

1. # of processors

2. This game ran in 630p and 720p and then the ps3 and the 360's transcoder would up scale the image. Your probably running a resolution beyond the 630-720p and unlike the xbox 360 you don't have an special 16mb up scaling chip.

3. There is a lot more going on in this game than other ones. You have physics and explosions and lots of things going on.

They should have worked a lot harder to get this game up for pc's but it's a reality slap to the face that computing is moving towards multiple core. Hell it might even be a conspiracy with Intel and AMD to get ppl to move towards quad core and up. I was gonna upgrade my processor to a much faster dual core something in the lines of 3.0ghz from my E6600 2.4 and with this going on I am seriously moving to quad core. Tempted to go with a nice i7, but that means new mobo, new ram.

Advantages if they finish patching this up is possible mods in the future. superior rez compared to console, and mods.

 

[WITHTEETH]

Re-asserting your opinion doesn't make something fact, no matter how many times you do it.The scale is less than San Andreas but the detail is far greater, there LOD is much more harsh showing more detailed textures at greater distance, there is also many objects including all the vehicles which have real time physics applied to them, the game overall is just much higher quality than San Andreas from pretty much any technical standpoint be that texture resolutions more unique meshes, greater detail to models, shadows, particle effects etc.

Most of the "performance issues" are with the CPU and not the GPU, and thats because GTA4 has a much greater demand on physics and AI compared to games like assassins creed and Far Cry 2, in fact Far Cry 2 is not even close in comparison, it has 1-2 vehicles about at most with only handful of AI controlled enemies.

Yes, however their "whole" is arbitrary and decided by the developers. This is the EXACT same problem as with view sliders and other sliding scale values that we saw with games like oblivion and Crysis where people epeen defence kicks in and they complain they cant set the sliders to max, or can "only" set them 1/2 way.

The developers could have easily have set 1/3rds to be the max setting and had a sliding scale between 0 and 33 instead, but what is the point to just please people who have epeen problems? Why not leave that scale much more open ended as they did with Crysis and allow future hardware (or enthusiats with decent PCs) the ability to run the game with even greater detail.

Oh wah wah wah we can't set it at max boo hoo, instead of saying "well the view distance doesn't look all that great when set to 33" and making a valid argument about the pay off of the view distance and the detail in it and comparing that to the slider people just fire off their usual baby cries of how the sliders are ONLY at X or ONLY at Z, but if you take the time to research you'll find thats a damn sight bigger than what the xbox runs (being used for comparison here and elsewhere) so in fact 33 (or 35) is actually fairly high in comparison, and in you take 20 secodns to look in game, actually is pretty damn far.



Again the "potential" is set by the developers as an arbitrary point, they've picked some value which is just "large" and you can set a value anywhere on a sliding scale between that, they could have easily have made the scale for number of cars start at 0 and move up to a billion cars, and when you can only set 0.0000001% on that scale is that a huge problem
Again I will reiterate that this is an epeen problem, people see a slider and naturally they want MAX because they've spent $500 on a PC or $1000 on a PC or some large number and the natural reaction when you can't have "max" or "large" on that scale is to get pissed off.

I hope some of you can begin to see that this is not a coherent argument, saying that 1/3 of an arbitrary scale isn't using something to its max potential, without understanding what that scale means.

I bet a great deal of you dont even realise that the view scale slider isn't even a linear one in comparison to performance. It's a bit like the area of a circle as the radius increases, the area doesnt increase proportional to the radius. In game this means it takes many more times the rendering power to get just twice the view distance.

So while the viewscale is a linear slider the performance against that slider isn't a linear one and it costs you more rendering time per increase on that slider depending on how far you are up it. Consoles run on a view distance of 22 according to rockstar, that means a view distance of 35 in my example is many times greater

If we assume the viewing angles of the arc are the same, and we're just bothered with relative area (percentage increase) we could just dump those numbers into the area of a circle to get the relative size, (Pi R^2) thats 22^2 * 3.141 = 1,520 units squared compared to 3,848 correct to 3dp, thats a factor increase of 250% the area being drawn and on average 250% more objects, assuming the max of that scale is 100 which im fairly sure it is, then thats 2000% more than the consoles, more objects being draw.

Some of you need some perspective and to think about this a little harder, boo hoo i only get 250% more area being drawn on the PC than the console, its not enough waaah



Where? What claims? A load of people are whinng and I'm saying I dont accept that because theres no decent coherent argument to back it up (at least so far)

Not accepting your claims doesn't mean Im making the opposite claim myself, at the moment Im fairly neutral on the situation, it appears to run well for me for what I see on screen (which is a lot) and it's yet to be seen if other people have slow performance for other reasons, for example we know by rockstars own admission that SLI does not work (scale)

WRONG, I dont claim it's not badly optimised, I simply dismiss peoples claims because they don't bring to the table a sufficient arugment for me to believe them. I've have stated several times in multiple GTA4 performance discussion threads that im happy to believe the game is badly opimised if someone can demonstrate a reason other than "it doesnt run well on my PC"

1. I'd say its an undeniable fact that FC2 runs worse than pong, without a detailed study of exactly what is being drawn on the screen in comparison nothing further meaningful can be infered. GTA4 appears to be incredibly details and set in a very open world which is packed with many unique models and textures (more so than a lot of games)

2. This is just an assumption they'll make a bad port, theres no real logical thinking there.

Evidence for what? Again im not saying the game is perfectly optimised, Ive never made such a claim, im simply asking those people flapping their mouths about unopimisation to actually provide some kind of coherent argument to support such claims, until they do I have no reason to believe such claims, especially since the game runs well and looks great on my PC

I never called anyone a moron, Im suggesting that people who are having problems for whatever reason would be better off with a console beacuse they're simpler to use and more problem free.

Sometimes poor performance is because of a bug with SLI or a setting in the game like vsync which not everyone knows about as its not displayed in the menu, and thats fine because not everyone has their head into PCs and cares to learn enough to work this stuff out, If you dont understand then get a console is definately going to make your life easier, it's just a suggestion!

Im just curious, do you work for Rockstar? lol

 

[Frostex]

No further comments to ManCannon, I've said enough I can't think of anything further to say that wouldn't be repeating points i've already made, for the record my performance isn't wildly out of line with all them games you've listed, and the game does delivery top notch visuals considering the scale of the environment.

What else can I say, you dont accidently get good performance on 1-2 PCs, its obvious that the people with the low frame rates are the ones who the are the odd ones out for whatever reason.

Yes there might be a load of threads on the "performance issues", but the people who are pissed off are the most vocal ones, most of the people that are happy with the game are going to tend to be quiet.

Don't worry about Frostex, he is a Rockstar apologist. No matter how shit the game is, he and others like him will have convinced themselves that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that any users complaining about performance/bugginess are outliers. Such is human nature, people do not like admitting to themselves they have wasted money on rubbish, so they convince themselves otherwise.

What a load of rubbish, I ask for a coherent argument because I disagree with the opinion that the game is badly optimised and that makes me an aplogist, you're a nutcase.

I dont think the game is rubbish and It was worth every penny, i'd glady buy it again if I had to make the choice again. Your assumptions are baseless and incorrect.

On the other hand you have people who have this mental quirk that if the slider is not set to 100, despite clear documentation from Rockstar as to exactly how the settings work, then something is terribly wrong with the game.

There has to be some balance somewhere in between all that.

The exact same thing happened with Crysis and people cried about the optimisation with that game as well, the boys over at Crytek said the same thing the most people would be running the game on medium settings and the high settings were set aside for future configurations, and yet we had people bitching them high/ultra settings weren't playable.

As i've previously written about, people assign some inherent value to the top end of the settings, you can see this mistake happening in this very thread where people like ManCannon refer to the top of the slider being the games "potential" and for some reason 1/3 of that slider isn't reaching the games potential...

When in reality the slider is an arbitrarly high value, so what we're talking about is 1/3rd of an arbitrary scale, how does that have any meaning at all?

It doesn't.

And in fact a lot of games which have graphical options as sliding scales often you can edit the games cfg files or ini files and extend that number to more or less whatever you like, Oblivion is a great example of this, you can set the view distance and grass density sliders to any value above the sliders maximum value (technically this tops out at the max size of the variable that holds that value but that is likely to be far higher than anything we could hope to render) Bethesda could have set the grass draw distance slider to 50x what it was in the game and we'd still have people complaining the game wasnt running at its potential.

People need to unhook themselves from this stupid meaningless mental quirk and actually analyze how good the game actually looks compared to how it runs, and to be quite frank GTA4 looks fantastic, the level of detail is pretty good, not great, but it's displayed over a very large area with a great deal of diversity.

 

[Frostex]

Im just curious, do you work for Rockstar? lol

Nope.

 

[hfk]

Wow. Frostex, you are trying to make people technically prove that the game is poorly optimized/ported, and technically I guess your terms are fair lol.. (even though rockstar themselves admitted that the release was broken), but you are only really, really being ignorant if you´ve attained your opinion of this, only from the fact (pls dont discuss what is and is not a fact with me your honor) that your own system that you´ve spent 40 million$ and all your life tweaking and learning to understand, is running the game barely well on med settings. And I´m affraid this is the case. But hey, you know you can only trust yourself in this world right, even if 80% of the fellow community are reporting severe graphical glitches as well as rediculous framerates with systems that are even well into the official min. required to recommended range.

The thing is that the fundamental issue here is about morality. Is it reasonable that this year old xbox game is unplayable (unplayable in this case = between 10-20fps your honor) on lowest fcking settings, on rigs that are about twice as powerful as the xbox, and run any other major 3D titles well on high settings? No, that is not REASONABLE sir, not to people like me or ManCannon or anybody else who doesnt act like they´re affiliated with rockstar...

 

[RESTfulADI]

I would bet a solid sum of money that if Rockstar had made the sliders in the options menu so that a setting of 30-40 was 100, a lot less people would complain about the performance and they would still think it looked better than console.

Nothing would stop the complaints about AA, lack of it seems to make people go apeshit.

People with dual cores really have no business complaining though, the game requires 3 cores to run efficiently and if Rockstar were required to rewrite the engine to bring it down from 3 threads to 2 and run just as well then we might not even a have a PC version.

 

[Darakian]

no hard numbers but my friends x2 3600 and 8600gt can't play this game beyond 10fps under any circumstances. Everything set to low, 800x600. This is with the patch.

 

[Casper312]

argh- as said,

X2 CHIPS WILL NOT GIVE YOU >30FPS IN GTAIV!

period. on average im saying. my opteron 165 isnt even playable unless i overclock it to 2.7ghz with my 8800gts g92, and even then its not the most fun.

if you have a 8800gt or better video card, an x2 is holding you back anyway. you want to play gta 4 correctly? you need an equivalent to a core2 duo at least- no matter what your video card is. END OF STORY.

btw- the latest nvidia drivers and the new gta patch DOES help quite a bit in performance, but the above is still very true.

+1

My E5200 @ 3.75ghz does fine in gta4 with my 9800gtx, while when i switch the card to my buddies 939 setup @ 3.1ghz, it struggles to keep 12 frames at times.

I do kinda agree with people saying its time to upgrade if your having problems, but i also agree this game can be better optimized. That said, if its that much of a problem, thats why we have the fs forum

Ill run the benchmark with my setup and post what i get in a bit, but the game is very playable but i do notice a bit of lag at some points, i went to 4.0ghz and it kinda went away.

 

[berndawg3]

Wow, I can't believe how much Frostex is owning you all in this debate. He may be against the grain, but at least his debate is logical and supported. I happen to be loving this game, much like him. I'm playing on my GTX260 and q6600 3.2GHz and I'm getting 30+ fps the majority of time. The game looks great with a draw distance of 28, and with textures on very high, this blows the console versions out of the water by playing at 1920x1200.

I agree that the coding (particularly the threading) was done poorly, but it still looks a hell of a lot better than the Xbox version. Plus, it's not like Rockstar forced you all to buy the game. It's your own fault if you don't like it. Speak with your wallet, not your e-mouth.

 

[defiant007]

Wow, I can't believe how much Frostex is owning you all in this debate.

 

[ManCannon]

I agree that the coding (particularly the threading) was done poorly, but it still looks a hell of a lot better than the Xbox version.

So, he's "pwning" all of us, yet you disagree with him and also believe it's a poorly coded game.

Okay .

+1My E5200 @ 3.75ghz does fine in gta4 with my 9800gtx

Well that's some major horse shit, because while the C2D's were better chips, the X2's aren't terrible by any means and with an X2 5000+ Black Edition clocked at 3.1 Ghz I can't get decent frames no matter the settings or resolution. It's not like I think my CPU is a monster or that my computer is top of the line, but I at least expected decent performance at console settings, especially considering the PC version can't even enable AA.

So basically the game just doesn't work on AMD Dual Core CPU's? If that's the case I don't see how anyone can call it anything but flat out broken.

 

[Q-BZ]

What else can I say, you dont accidently get good performance on 1-2 PCs, its obvious that the people with the low frame rates are the ones who the are the odd ones out for whatever reason.

You're understating this a bit. If you look here and abroad on other forums including Rockstar's own the numbers of people with a myriad of configurations having a lot of the same kinds of problems is rather signifigant.

There are some real issues at play here with the game. Can you at least admit that much?

Yes there might be a load of threads on the "performance issues", but the people who are pissed off are the most vocal ones, most of the people that are happy with the game are going to tend to be quiet.

In general, this tends to be true.

The exact same thing happened with Crysis and people cried about the optimisation with that game as well, the boys over at Crytek said the same thing the most people would be running the game on medium settings and the high settings were set aside for future configurations, and yet we had people bitching them high/ultra settings weren't playable.

As i've previously written about, people assign some inherent value to the top end of the settings, you can see this mistake happening in this very thread where people like ManCannon refer to the top of the slider being the games "potential" and for some reason 1/3 of that slider isn't reaching the games potential...

When in reality the slider is an arbitrarly high value, so what we're talking about is 1/3rd of an arbitrary scale, how does that have any meaning at all?

It doesn't.

And in fact a lot of games which have graphical options as sliding scales often you can edit the games cfg files or ini files and extend that number to more or less whatever you like, Oblivion is a great example of this, you can set the view distance and grass density sliders to any value above the sliders maximum value (technically this tops out at the max size of the variable that holds that value but that is likely to be far higher than anything we could hope to render) Bethesda could have set the grass draw distance slider to 50x what it was in the game and we'd still have people complaining the game wasnt running at its potential.

People need to unhook themselves from this stupid meaningless mental quirk and actually analyze how good the game actually looks compared to how it runs, and to be quite frank GTA4 looks fantastic, the level of detail is pretty good, not great, but it's displayed over a very large area with a great deal of diversity.

One important difference here: I gave Crysis more "latitude" and "forgiveness" for one simple reason: It was made for the PC from the ground up whereas this was a console port which basically meant you port over the 360 code, which is basically the same thing the PC uses, slap a bunch of extra goodies and eye candy on it (I'm oversimplifying), throw down some of the things PC folks look for, and call it a day.

The fact that this game did indeed come out as buggy as it is, given how much time Rockstar had to work on a console port, really is a lot less forgiveable and excuseable than Crysis. MMA10 fatal error. RESC10 fatal error. Hell, the whole laundry list of errors and crashes people are getting and the only suggested solution is "reboot your system" from Rockstar. C'mon.


http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1358363

^^ This was Rockstar's last effort on the PC. Even worse of a mess than this has been.

Frankly, Rockstar's track record with GTA games on the PC leaves something to be desired. The "plug the control in and watch the camera spin" glitch is basically a "tradition" that goes back to the original GTAIII on the PC, for example.

So really, this is nothing new.

I do think that the "needing" the Social Club to run the game is incredibly stupid to boot and this is a model I hope I never see the likes of again and I hope dies here and now.


In my case, once I learned how to use the sliders properly, actual game performance has been great for me. I have a GTX280 SC on a Intel QX9650 4GB ram system. The game looks, sounds, and runs great for me and I'm a little mystified myself as to how some people with comparable to superior rigs than mine seem to be having more performance issues than me.

 

[ManCannon]

I do think that the "needing" the Social Club to run the game is incredibly stupid to boot and this is a model I hope I never see the likes of again and I hope dies here and now.

Yeah, that irked me too.

Want to play the game? Well first you need to install our bloatware. All set now? Well let's get playing. Oh wait, you don't have Games for Windows Live installed? Yeah, you're going to want to install that too.

 

[Q-BZ]

Yeah, that irked me too.

Want to play the game? Well first you need to install our bloatware. All set now? Well let's get playing. Oh wait, you don't have Games for Windows Live installed? Yeah, you're going to want to install that too.

It just shouldn't be like that. And then you package a bunch of DRM nonsense on top of all this as well.

It's the kind of thing that makes people like me who always try to buy legitimately feel like I'm being punished, or at least nagged, because of the actions of other people. That's one of my pet peeves in general. I don't like it.

I shouldn't have to practically give bodily fluid samples to run a game that I legitimately buy. I don't like this concept of being dependent on the Internet, literally, to even play a single player component of a game. That just shouldn't be IMO.

 

[Frostex]

Loads of people bought GTA4 and there are a lot of moan thread on forums but that constitutes a small percentage of the overall people who bought the game, most of which I've seen openly admit they have pretty slow CPU's etc.

Yeah I agree the social club thing is gay, if that happens for all games and we just tolerate it, imagine how many apps we'd have running in the background, scary.

Anyway still playing this game and tweaking stuff a bit, my frame rate for the most part has stayed good despite me turning up a few of the additional graphical settings which dont require additional additional memory like the detail distance and the filtering. Still having a blast with this game.

 

[Q-BZ]

Loads of people bought GTA4 and there are a lot of moan thread on forums but that constitutes a small percentage of the overall people who bought the game, most of which I've openly admit they have pretty slow CPU's etc.

That's probably true. That's the way it is in general. There's always an unknown vocal minority that, if they have ANY problem to even the smallest degree, they hit the Internet and for each one of them there are x number of other perfectly happy people that never hit the Internet at all.

It's all too easy to complain.

Yeah I agree the social club thing is gay, if that happens for all games and we just tolerate it, imagine how many apps we'd have running in the background, scary.

It needs to be put down. I really hope there's some kind of backlash against this sort of thing. It's really a terrible concept.

Anyway still playing this game and tweaking stuff a bit, my frame rate for the most part has stayed good despite me turning up a few of the additional graphical settings which dont require additional additional memory like the detail distance and the filtering. Still having a blast with this game.

I've been having a blast since the beginning save for the MMA10 and RESC10 fatal errors. Once I figured out all I need to do is keep my numbers "in the green" I've been good to go and I stand by what I've said since the beginning, which is: I think this is the ultimate version of this game and it doesn't take much to have it be way better than the console versions.

But there are some real bugs and problems with it to some degree or another as well and that's a real shame.

 

[ManCannon]

most of which I've seen openly admit they have pretty slow CPU's etc.

There's a large difference between having a slow CPU and having a CPU that's not top of the line.

Honestly, an X2 clocked at over 3 Ghz should have no trouble running a 360 port at console settings (without the AA of the console version to boot), not when it absolutely decimates every other 360 port out there. I don't understand how you can argue otherwise.