GTA IV running poorly despite great specs

At maximum settings, GTA IV's framerate drops to the low 30s or high 20s, despite the graphics-options menu informing me that only 993Mb out of 3GB of my video card's (HD 7970) vram is being used. I have to use the automatic configuration, which uses a little over 700Mb of VRAM, to get fantastic framerates constantly (50 - 60 FPS). Keep in mind that my i7-920 is OC'ed to 4GHz. Why is this so? Is the HD 7970 not good enough?

It runs like shit on my computer too.(specs on sig)

The optimization is a joke.

Sounds about right.

Runs terribly for me as well.

I barely noticed a difference when I upgraded my graphics card.

Don't blame your poor PC, blame Rockstar. She's doing the best she cans with such a badly optimized game.gp19

[QUOTE="gp19"]Don't blame your poor PC, blame Rockstar. She's doing the best she cans with such a badly optimized game.BluRayHiDef

It's not strong enough to run the game

Like another poster said, one day we'll have enough horsepower common available to there wont be any problems

[QUOTE="gp19"]Don't blame your poor PC, blame Rockstar. She's doing the best she cans with such a badly optimized game.BluRayHiDef

Turn the distance sliders to 30-40.

I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. 04dcarraher

Yeah some people even got it running right with even C2D's. There also seem to be random problems with extreme pop-in even with modern cards.

I can run gta 4 maxed on my rig with the fps dipping into the 30s occasianally. But that is when it actually works. I have crash on startup :/

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. glez13

Yeah some people even got it running right with even C2D's. There also seem to be random problems with extreme pop-in even with modern cards.

[QUOTE="glez13"]

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. 04dcarraher

Yeah some people even got it running right with even C2D's. There also seem to be random problems with extreme pop-in even with modern cards.

What version are you running? I heard the steam version (latest update) isn't as stable as one of the patches before it. I know that you have to downpatch it to use most mods out there.

What version are you running? I heard the steam version (latest update) isn't as stable as one of the patches before it. I know that you have to downpatch it to use most mods out there.

6_Dead_360s

I got my copy from Steam, but I'm not sure which version I'm running. However, I should mention that I redownloaded it three weeks ago.

Is there anyway I can get the game to use as much of my card's VRAM as possible?

Is there anyway I can get the game to use as much of my card's VRAM as possible?

BluRayHiDef

Is there anyway I can get the game to use as much of my card's VRAM as possible?

BluRayHiDef

I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. 04dcarraher

[QUOTE="BluRayHiDef"]

Is there anyway I can get the game to use as much of my card's VRAM as possible?

superclocked

Is there anyway I can get the game to use as much of my card's VRAM as possible?

BluRayHiDef

The game uses what it uses unless you have for example a 2GB card but the game only shows 1GB or something else that is wrong.

If it's wrong, create a commandline in the exe directory and use:

-availablevidmem X (where X equals the real amount of VRAM divided by the wrong amount of VRAM the game displays)

GTA IV was a bad port. Don't run max. Especially reduce draw distance/detail.dramaybaz

I hope GTA V will be a good port.

BluRayHiDef

In all seriousness though, there is no way the console limitations won't be obvious. I'll be impressed if they give us pc gamers a hi res texture pack instead of just using the same assets on all platforms, which was a problem with the mass effect games.

[QUOTE="BluRayHiDef"]

[QUOTE="gp19"]Don't blame your poor PC, blame Rockstar. She's doing the best she cans with such a badly optimized game.Jaysonguy

It's not strong enough to run the game

Like another poster said, one day we'll have enough horsepower common available to there wont be any problems

[QUOTE="Jaysonguy"]

[QUOTE="BluRayHiDef"] My PC's not poor. It's no slouch.

bobbetybob

It's not strong enough to run the game

Like another poster said, one day we'll have enough horsepower common available to there wont be any problems

Gta 4 has always ran extremely well for me, I can max it out with icehancer and it still ran at 60 fps. Even when I had my 560 ti, the game was nearly maxed and still had a 30-45 fps average. GamingVengeance

[QUOTE="BluRayHiDef"]

[QUOTE="gp19"]Don't blame your poor PC, blame Rockstar. She's doing the best she cans with such a badly optimized game.adamosmaki

Is it sad that none of you could figure out how gp19 was saying it?

He meant it as in "Aw, you poor thing.". As in, "Your poor PC, it must be having such a hard time running such a bitch of a game."

He wasn't insulting your computer, which is rather nice by the way.

gtaIV ran ok on my computer with my old 6950.  I did have to reduce the draw distance settings, otherwise it would hammer my FPS.

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. 2ndWonder

Something like this randomly happens to me also. Sometimes when I start the game I get around 20-25fps no matter if I lower everything to minimum even resolution to 800x600. Then the next day, without doing anything it returns to normal. This game is weird.

[QUOTE="2ndWonder"][QUOTE="04dcarraher"]I was one of the lucky ones I suppose... on two different pc's it ran fine. glez13

Something like this randomly happens to me also. Sometimes when I start the game I get around 20-25fps no matter if I lower everything to minimum even resolution to 800x600. Then the next day, without doing anything it returns to normal. This game is weird.

you might want to put icenhancer or an enb over it,i found out that the reason gta sucks on pc, is that allot of stuff that's mutitread is offloaded to the cpu,

now that's fine, but when the game released on pc, intel just released the core two duo, so not much multi-treading there, compared to the console cpu's, witch at the time were multi-tread monsters, so instead of offloading these multi-treaded code to your gpu like any sane person would do, they went and put in a x86 box. imagine this, if you have a 100 page book, what would work faster, a 100 people reading a page each, or 1 or 2 reading page for page. what icenhancer does, strangely enough, is offload some ''texture mapping'' ect to your GPU i mean why would these things be on your cpu Any way, i actually got a 15+/- frames increase and the game looks more awesome in the process.

stable frame rate how ever still alludes me tough:),  in the strangest places it drops to 22/25 or something (lonely road/bridge), but when i have 10+ or more cars on screen near a square with a but load of people. in the middle of the city 40/60+ frames, save to say, i have no clue whats going on here.

also overclocking is your friend, normally you'd never notice it in a game , but with gta4, every Hz helps those 1 or 2 people read the book faster, because those core2 duo's ran at 3+ Ghz to you know. 

It's one of the reasons why people never bought the game.

We need more powerful hardware from the future to run this game? Lol at these comments. The game is poorly POORLY coded. And it isn't even a looker. It looks dated. Hopefully when GTA5 launches on PC and runs well, everyone will just let this GTA4 on the PC crap die..Elann2008