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[Caesar III]

I managed to get the textures to medium. But only on 1024x768 with 16 draw distance. But this game is so great. I love it.

 

[CabbageRed]

i wanna see what comical shit it does

Well, first it will make people insinuate that those having issues stole the game, and soon it will make owners suspect that the bugs they are running into are caused by DRM/PM and generate tons of negative feedback.

Everyone will (presumably) be wrong, but the sooner that Rockstar clarifies what they've done, the less confusion will be allowed to grow and people can focus on assiting one another with issues rather than getting lost in FUD.

How does Rockstar not have a forum in this day and age?

 

[Dabanton]

How does Rockstar not have a forum in this day and age?

Because they'd have to be accountable to the buyers of their games.

 

[AgentOtaku]

Holy fucking shit!

I was genuinely curious to see how the PC version was gonna turn out, though could never picture myself playing with a Kb/mouse and I hate the 360 controller. This some terrible shit to be hearing!

*goes back collecting trophies*

 

[Caesar III]

I managed to get the textures to medium. But only on 1024x768 with 16 draw distance. But this game is so great. I love it.

with draw distance @ 1 I can push it to 1280x1024 and after a few minutes it runes fine (just like the old GTA games did :lol)
What draw distance setting had the console version?

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

do want, but nobody seems to have it until the 4th

 

[Oblong Schlong]

Holy fucking shit!

I was genuinely curious to see how the PC version was gonna turn out, though could never picture myself playing with a Kb/mouse and I hate the 360 controller. This some terrible shit to be hearing!

*goes back collecting trophies*

That trolling was subtle like a MGS4 cutscene.

 

[Flunkie]

That trolling was subtle like a MGS4 cutscene.

So it would have been okay if he said "goes back to collecting achievements"?

:\

 

[derder]

Here's to hoping it gets patched before I finish my fall 2008 backlog

Spoiler

but before skate 2 comes out!

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

woot! grabbed it at EB games, installing now, can't wait to see how hard my rig struggles with it

Intel Q9300@3ghz
Geforce 9800gtx
3 gigs of ram(damn you xp!)


This weekend i'm going to grab a few more hard drives, install vista 64. see if there is any performance change with DX 10, couple more gigs of ram.

 

[Hazaro]

woot! grabbed it at EB games, installing now, can't wait to see how hard my rig struggles with it

Intel Q9300@3ghz
Geforce 9800gtx
3 gigs of ram(damn you xp!)


This weekend i'm going to grab a few more hard drives, install vista 64. see if there is any performance change with DX 10, couple more gigs of ram.

Resolution?

I mean it doesn't matter anyway since you are going to be posting comparisons of clockspeeds with cores disabled at each resolution.

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

Resolution?

I mean it doesn't matter anyway since you are going to be posting comparisons of clockspeeds with cores disabled at each resolution.

going to be running at 720p

 

[blindrocket]

Wow, I do believe that my PS3 version looks and performs better. In fact, other than it looking a little blurry at times, I have no complaints with it.

I remember being a PC gamer in the GTA3/Vice City days and I seem to remember it looking and performing fine back then. I wonder what happened? I thought all games that were on the 360 were supposed to be easy to port to PC (and vice versa)?

 

[Chiggs]

That trolling was subtle like a MGS4 cutscene.

:lol

 

[CabbageRed]

Whelp. It seems GTA IV's installer is convinced that I have a dated version of XP, and I'm now getting an Rmn40 error and cannot play. Pity that I cannot go to the Rockstar forums and do a little troubleshooting with other GTAIV owners. Rockstar is making a very poor impression. Here's to hoping that things improve.

At least Steam has my back as far of forums/community support is concerned. Going to follow jlesamiz's advice and reinstall/repair SP1 on my copy of Vista.

Hopefully I can post some basic benchmark results soon.

 

[cybropm]

I am still downloading through steam.

Have a pretty beefed up dell gaming xps laptop so will report back about how things go.

 

[Chiggs]

I'm really itching to see how my quad core handles this.

 

[DaMan121]

Wow, I do believe that my PS3 version looks and performs better. In fact, other than it looking a little blurry at times, I have no complaints with it.

I remember being a PC gamer in the GTA3/Vice City days and I seem to remember it looking and performing fine back then. I wonder what happened? I thought all games that were on the 360 were supposed to be easy to port to PC (and vice versa)?

Well its seems GTA4 is the exception - you would be hard pressed name another multi-platform game where the console version was in anyway superior to the PC version. Hopefully drivers / patches are released soon, cause like others have said, GTA4 aint no Crysis visually, and you shouldn't need to be installing Vista 64, quad core cpus, etc to run this.

Whelp. It seems GTA IV's installer is convinced that I have a dated version of XP,

SP3?

 

[Chiggs]

Pretty decent thread over at NVNews:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=124023

Seems that quads do significantly better. Here's some results from a Hard Forum member.

Statistics
Average FPS: 47.12
Duration: 36.99 sec
CPU Usage: 74%
System memory usage: 74%
Video memory usage: 98%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1920 x 1080 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Render Quality: Very High
View Distance: 32
Detail Distance: 70

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Ultimate
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
Video Driver version: 180.48
Audio Adapter: Speakers (Creative SB X-Fi)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz

Very subtle difference between the texture settings:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1862075&postcount=96

 

[Zzoram]

Pretty decent thread over at NVNews:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=124023

Seems that quads do significantly better. Here's some results from a Hard Forum member.



Very subtle difference between the texture settings:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1862075&postcount=96

That pretty much confirms it, the game is CPU-Core limited. The E8400 3.0GHz is faster than the Q6600 2.4GHz in every game, except ones designed for 3+ cores specifically.

 

[TheExodu5]

Benchmark from the Steam boards:

Average FPS: 37.46
CPU Usage: 67%
System memory usage: 81%
Video memory usage: 97%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: Medium
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 30
Detail Distance: 35

Hardware
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Service Pack 3
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Video Driver version: 178.24
Audio Adapter: SB Audigy 2 Audio [EC00]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz

97% video memory usage!?!? Only on medium textures!?!? :lol :lol :lol

edit: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Maxed out, with no AA, at 1680*1050, the game needs 1.5GB of VRAM. AHAHAHAHA.

Rockstar is an absolute joke.

 

[Chiggs]

That pretty much confirms it, the game is CPU-Core limited. The E8400 3.0GHz is faster than the Q6600 2.4GHz in every game, except ones designed for 3+ cores specifically.

Yep. My Q6600 is well over 3.0ghz, and I've got a 4870 1GB oc'd, so I should be good to go with this game. Post some screens after class.

 

[brain_stew]

Guys remember, when you say you're running it on Low and getting 20fps, you're running it on low at 1680x1050 or 1280x1024. The 360 version was 30fps at 1280x720, probably on Medium with sliders at like 20-30.

The consoles version definitely weren't a constant 30 fps and their terrible performance is precisely the reason why the PC version was initially attractive. Regardless, it shouldn't matter anyway, we're talking about GPUs about 4x more capable than those found in the current gen. consoles. All other multiplatform games run maxed out at a constant 60fps, with 4xaa/8xaf @ 1680x1050 on this level of hardware so there's no excuse for this port to be nowhere near that level.

If it was optimized for the 3-core Xbox 360, and they were too lazy to fix it for 2-core PC CPUs, then it's possible. Has anyone with a Quadcore reported bad performance?

Considering how terrible the performance of each of the 360's CPU cores is, that shouldn't make any difference. A 2ghz Core 2 Duo will run rings around Xenon, nevermind one clocked @ 3ghz.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

Wow, this sounds so horribly optimized. I have practically the same set-up as the OP and it's going to run even worse than the consoles? WTF?

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

god damn, this is fucking ridiculous.

i love gta 4, i love rockstar, but the amount of fucking hoops you have to jump through just to play this fucking pc game is fucking rediculous.


install fiddyleven programs, get to the GTA launch screen, hit play, and it says you need to update games for windows first. do that then try the fucking benchmark tool, and it says you have to sign into GFW live, sign into GFW, it spends 10 minutes downloading your profile, then the game loads, and it says "a sign-in changed, restarting...." with enter as the only input option, and it hangs there.

you finally get into the benchmark, it comes back with the result "benchmark failed", you press escape, it says "load failed, please check your hard drive" check my fucking hard drive?

gahhhhhhh.

got through the benchmark on standard settings
average fps: 44.71
cpu: 49%
system mem: 67%
video mem: 90%

res:1360x765 60hz(running on lcd right now)
texture quality: medium
render quality: medium
view distance: 25
detail distancce: 37

 

[Chiggs]

Wow, this sounds so horribly optimized. I have practically the same set-up as the OP and it's going to run even worse than the consoles? WTF?

Avoid at all costs until they patch this up (or the community does).

 

[Chiggs]

got through the benchmark on standard settings
average fps: 44.71
cpu: 49%
system mem: 67%
video mem: 90%

res:1360x765 60hz(running on lcd right now)
texture quality: medium
render quality: medium
view distance: 25
detail distancce: 37

Hmmm...I think I'm gonna take some shots of the 360/PS3 version running on my Bravia, and then do some comparisons with the pc version. I'm curious to see if the medium setting is significantly better than the console versions.

 

[Lince]

maybe the PC engine isn't doing any texture streaming at all and tries to fit everything into VRAM, that's the only logical explanation for the craptacular performance even with low/med textures.

 

[brain_stew]

maybe the PC engine isn't doing any texture streaming at all and tries to fit everything into VRAM, that's the only logical explanation for the craptacular performance even with low/med textures.

Considering the engine fit into less than 256MB of VRAM on the PS3, this seems the only logical explanation so far. If that means they can patch in texture streaming later on for a big performance boost, then that'd be great but I'm not holding out much hope. This is off my to buy list for the moment.

The most laughable part is no way to enable AA, despite the fact all the press shots had it cranked right up it was specifically mentioned in previews. What a joke.

 

[Zzoram]

What excuse do they have for not including an AA option in a PC game?

 

[CabbageRed]

What excuse do they have for not including an AA option in a PC game?

Isn't FSAA hard on VRAM? Considering that the game fills up a card's VRAM on textures alone, I cannot see FSAA having much of a chance.

 

[Zzoram]

Isn't FSAA hard on VRAM? Considering that the game fills up a card's VRAM on textures alone, I cannot see FSAA having much of a chance.

Why don't they do texture streaming them? They shouldn't try to load 1.5gb of textures into VRAM at once. Only GTX280 SLI or 4870x2 owners can meet the insane VRAM requirements.

 

[bloodline]

Was going to pick this up...glad I saw this thread. Will definitely be passing now.

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

core 2 quad@3ghz
512mb 9800gtx
3 gigs mem

settings:
1360x765 res(60hz)
texture quality: medium(locked at medium )
render quality: high(just turned it up to highest, doesn't seem like any performance hit)
view distance: 34
detail distancce: 56
vehicle density: 54
shadow density: 3

just jumped in a car and drove around for a bit.

 

[TheExodu5]

Okay, looks like things were blown a little out of proportion. Apparently this is the ReadMe:

THE GRAPHIC SETTINGS OF GRAND THEFT AUTO IV PC

Most users using current PC hardware as of December 2008 are advised to use medium graphics settings. Higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available.

Graphics settings are limited by system resources by default. 256MB video cards force minimum settings by default. If a user bypasses these safety measures using command line arguments and exceeds their system resources, the users gaming experience may be compromised.


Video Mode
Resolution scaling effects water, reflections, shadows, mirrors and the visible viewable distance. The resolution settings relate to the amount of available video memory. At 2560*1600 the game will require 320MB of video memory in addition to all the memory required for content. At 800*600 the game will require 32MB of video memory in addition to the content. Medium resolution settings are recommended for most users as higher settings are only usable if there is available video memory.

Texture Quality
Texture quality affects the visual quality of the content of the game. High setting for textures will require 600MB of video memory at a setting of 21 View Distance in addition to the memory taken by the Video Mode. A medium texture setting is recommended for most users.

Render Quality
Render quality is the texture filter quality used on most things in the world rendering. Most people would know this as anisotropic filtering. Medium settings are recommended for most users and will provide filtering beyond what the console versions can execute.

View Distance
View distance scales the distance in which different objects in the world such as building and cars are seen. Raising this option increases the distance in which high quality objects must be loaded and will increase the memory it requires. Restrictions are established to ensure the game runs optimally for most users. A setting of 22 or more will provide PC users an enhanced experience over the console versions.

Detail Distance
Detail distance scales aspects of the environment that the View Distance setting does not including vegetation, trash and other moveable objects. A setting of 10 would be the equivalent to the performance on a console. This setting has little effect on memory.

Vehicle Density
Vehicle density scales the traffic density of the traffic in the game. It has no effect on the mission vehicles or difficultly of the game, but can have a significant impact on CPU performance

Shadow Density
Shadow Density controls the number of shadows generated for positional lights in exterior environments. These shadows are exclusive to the PC version and can have a major impact on CPU and GPU performance.

Crossfire/SLI
With the latest ATI driver (8-11 series) the game supports crossfire modes (ie. 4870x2)
SLI is currently unsupported. Support will be added through a future game patch as well as an updated Nvidia driver.

Not great, but not awful. As they say, those settings are very low on the console, so it looks like performance is somewhat in-line with the console version. The engine simply allows for a lot more than what was shown on console, and what current PCs are capable of.

The shadows alone probably degrade performance quite a bit, and they weren't even present in the console version.

 

[Hazaro]

rant

got through the benchmark on standard settings
average fps: 44.71
cpu: 49%
system mem: 67%
video mem: 90%

res:1360x765 60hz(running on lcd right now)
texture quality: medium
render quality: medium
view distance: 25
detail distancce: 37

What a load of bullshit.

Other person said benchmark gives higher fps than actual play as well.

 

[CabbageRed]

Why don't they do texture streaming them? They shouldn't try to load 1.5gb of textures into VRAM at once. Only GTX280 SLI or 4870x2 owners can meet the insane VRAM requirements.

I believe that can be laid at the feet of Rockstar and what they consider to be acceptable. Right now it just seems like an uncommonly poor port.

Thinking about VRAM and FSAA, I wonder if edge-detect would work since it is shader-based.

 

[CajoleJuice]

Thinking about it, I guess it makes sense, since the console versions seemed to run at like 15 fps half the time.

 

[Hazaro]

Yeah, that's not even 4xAA. Highest my ass.

Sure ain't 45 fps either.


Maybe an ATi card will help.

 

[cybropm]

GTA IV FATAL ERROR: RMN40

What the???

Spent 5hr's downloading through steam for this?! What the hell Rockstar?!

What am I supposed to do now?

My setup is...
GAMINGLAPTOP
512 NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_qfe.080814-1242)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3326MB RAM
Page File: 1112MB used, 4096MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.090

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[CabbageRed]

GTA IV FATAL ERROR: RMN40

What the???

Spent 5hr's downloading through steam for this?! What the hell Rockstar?!

What am I supposed to do now?

My setup is...
GAMINGLAPTOP
512 NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_qfe.080814-1242)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3326MB RAM
Page File: 1112MB used, 4096MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.090

Any help is greatly appreciated.

You need to update to SP3 and everything should be fine.

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

messed with the settings a bit

res: 1360x765
texture:medium
render: high(at highest, gets close to 15fps when you're really pushing it)

view distance: 42
detail: 100
vehicle: 100
shadow: 16

fraps stuck around the 30 mark through the bench, but as you can see in the screens, hovers closer to the 20-25 mark with no dips under 20. it seems the benchmark is less system intensive than actually playing the game.

 

[Broseybrose]

I will be playing it, once I buy it. Who knows when that'll be, though? : )

 

[Hazaro]

Can you try a higher resolution or no?

 

[Broseybrose]

wait, does this game have the most insane requirements ever or are some people just having problems?

 

[RobertM]

Lol definite version

Spoiler

I kid I kid

. Strange to see such horrible performance issues. All of previous GTA ran pretty damn good, even my GeForce 2 card was able to handle GTA3.

 

[TheExodu5]

^aw what the hell...this still has the 360's dithering issue?

 

[Pimpbaa]

Why don't they do texture streaming them? They shouldn't try to load 1.5gb of textures into VRAM at once. Only GTX280 SLI or 4870x2 owners can meet the insane VRAM requirements.

Because PCs are particularly good at doing that. Performance takes a nose dive when textures have to be transferred across the pci-e bus.

 

[Hazaro]

^aw what the hell...this still has the 360's dithering issue?

What issue was this?

 

[SIP YEK NOD]

^aw what the hell...this still has the 360's dithering issue?

on "high" rendering, there is still higher and highest, both solve the dithering problem, but both come with performance hits.

this computer with a nvidia 280 would likely be able to run comfortably on high, maybe even highest.