GTA IV - Quad or Core i7 needed!

[fhpchris]

Everyone is saying, "Whaah!!! MY E8400 cant run this well!!!!!, Its just a terrible port, LOL"

Core i7 > your E8400.

[GAR]

Yeah the graphics arent crazy, very average and not up to PC standards, BUT the game is a blast, i am enjoying it very much.

[P0gMoTho1n]

Yeah the graphics arent crazy, very average and not up to PC standards, BUT the game is a blast, i am enjoying it very much.

Yes, graphics aren't up there with Crysis, but the city is immense, You can see that alot of work has gone in2 producing this. Hope they optimise it a bit better, runs ok for me but I've a Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz, but my other pc (XP, E6600 @ stock, 2GB ram, 512MB 8800GT @ stock) is struggling with 1280x1024. I'm also enjoying it.

[noinimod]

Yes, graphics aren't up there with Crysis, but the city is immense, You can see that alot of work has gone in2 producing this. Hope they optimise it a bit better, runs ok for me but I've a Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz, but my other pc (XP, E6600 @ stock, 2GB ram, 512MB 8800GT @ stock) is struggling with 1280x1024. I'm also enjoying it.

Producing, maybe. Optimizing, definitely not.
The graphics aren't up there with any semi-decent looking game of 2008.. heck, even 2007.

[JohnZS]

Sorry to go on a bit of a rant here guys

I'm a huge fan of the GTA series and legitimately own every GTA game from GTA1 up until GTA San Andreas on my PC....however as bad as this may sound, R* are crap at supporting their PC fanbase.

To put it bluntly I would not hold your breath on ANY more patches other than the initial "token" 1.1 patch.

I have had dealings with R* before, and on numerous occasions and have reported reproducible bugs in GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas. Initially my reports were to frontline support @ Take2games, but eventually I got through to R* (series of e-mails with screen shots and dxdiag logs etc got me passed up the chain..)

All that R* did was thanked me for my time and AGREED that they were bugs which they could also reproduce on their test PC's and in their development environment, but said they would not release a patch as they were working on "other projects", but would make a not of the bugs as to try and not incorporate them in any future games.

This happened with Vice City and San Andreas. All we get is ONE patch (A last minute fix or 2 which did not make it into the final release, or in the case of San Andreas to remove something mass hysteria did not want in the game (no hot coffee patch)).

R* hang people out to dry and don't care, they just milk the money cow.

I wish more developers were like vALVE WHO DO LISTEN AND SUPPORT THEIR FANBASE.

Yes when Half-Life 2 was released their was the initial problems with "stutter", but vALVE worked hard and eventually ironed this gremlin out within at least a couple of months of launch.

I have not yet bought GTA4 (therefore have not played it), and I will only purchase this IF the issues many people on the net are reporting have at least been addressed in patches.

I hope that with this being a "Games for Windows Certified Game", R* will have to do more support for their end users, otherwise...GTA4 will be yet another buggy Port which had so much potential, yet failed at the finishing post.

Here endeth the rant

John

[DeathReborn]

Sorry to go on a bit of a rant here guys

I'm a huge fan of the GTA series and legitimately own every GTA game from GTA1 up until GTA San Andreas on my PC....however as bad as this may sound, R* are crap at supporting their PC fanbase.

To put it bluntly I would not hold your breath on ANY more patches other than the initial "token" 1.1 patch.

I have had dealings with R* before, and on numerous occasions and have reported reproducible bugs in GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas. Initially my reports were to frontline support @ Take2games, but eventually I got through to R* (series of e-mails with screen shots and dxdiag logs etc got me passed up the chain..)

All that R* did was thanked me for my time and AGREED that they were bugs which they could also reproduce on their test PC's and in their development environment, but said they would not release a patch as they were working on "other projects", but would make a not of the bugs as to try and not incorporate them in any future games.

This happened with Vice City and San Andreas. All we get is ONE patch (A last minute fix or 2 which did not make it into the final release, or in the case of San Andreas to remove something mass hysteria did not want in the game (no hot coffee patch)).

R* hang people out to dry and don't care, they just milk the money cow.

I wish more developers were like vALVE WHO DO LISTEN AND SUPPORT THEIR FANBASE.

Yes when Half-Life 2 was released their was the initial problems with "stutter", but vALVE worked hard and eventually ironed this gremlin out within at least a couple of months of launch.

I have not yet bought GTA4 (therefore have not played it), and I will only purchase this IF the issues many people on the net are reporting have at least been addressed in patches.

I hope that with this being a "Games for Windows Certified Game", R* will have to do more support for their end users, otherwise...GTA4 will be yet another buggy Port which had so much potential, yet failed at the finishing post.

Here endeth the rant

John

Game support might be a bit crap but at least GTA and it's brethren were made free after 7~ years. Valve could do that with Half Life (instead of $1 sales) but they haven't.

[Papu]

Game support might be a bit crap but at least GTA and it's brethren were made free after 7~ years. Valve could do that with Half Life (instead of $1 sales) but they haven't.

a dollar is as good as free tbh..

[VOID WARRANTY]

Everyone is saying, "Whaah!!! MY E8400 cant run this well!!!!!, Its just a terrible port, LOL"

Core i7 > your E8400.

Not me i run my e8400 @ 4.45ghz on 1.344v and have no problem feeding it more juice...

[Fungus]

My E8500+9800GX2 runs it fine... I just don't have enough ram to run it 1920*1200 and High texture quality. (1600*1200 and medium) it runs 50fps+ (100 draw distance etc).

I noticed the nvidia SLI profile doesn't function properly, so I used nhancer to add the correct exe filename (seems case sensitive) and then it worked fine.

[Loque]

This game gains more fps from fsb increase than cpu clock, rockstar already sent a patch to m$ for validation and new gfx drivers will include performance tweaks.. hopefully this poor port will be more playable.

[noinimod]

JohnZS: I'm with you. Can't understand why people think there's gonna be some miracle patch that takes away all the lousy optimization. I seriously doubt that R* was dumb enough not to know how badly the game ran on most setups. Despite that they still released it.. that sure tells me something.

[Leeghoofd]

Think some more patches will hopefully give it a nice boost and less choppy performance... runs most of the time fine here on a E8500@4Ghz with 500FSB and 4GB ram...

[mikeyakame]

It definitely seems to be all about front side bus speed! I get similar frame rate with my Q6600 only running 3.36ghz, but with 478Mhz FSB compared to alot of others pumping high frequency into the CPU (3.6+ghz) with much lower FSB. It's far from perfect and whacking up GPU clocks definitely doesn't help all that much, even at 1920x1200.

Problem is at lower FSB frequency you begin to run into bus bottlenecks when using highish CPU frequency. It negates the increase in clock freq unless you raise the FSB accordingly to accomodate. FSB is a shared bus for all traffic so it's heavily impacted by too much data throughput. QPI on the other hand shouldn't be encountering this problem with its multiple point to point links.

[rockfella]

LOL how about Q6600 @ 4 ghz?

[mikeyakame]

dont know compare apples and apples i guess.

Statistics
Average FPS: 51.92
Duration: 37.12 sec
CPU Usage: 75%
System memory usage: 74%
Video memory usage: 97%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1920 x 1200 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 31
Detail Distance: 100

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Business
Service Pack 2, v.113
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
Video Driver version: 180.84
Audio Adapter: Speakers (SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz

thats at 3.36ghz 7x478MHz. GTX280 @ 700/1458/2600

I know the ingame benchmark means nothing but its a way of comparing apples with apples.

Honestly if you want the truth, my Q6600 running 3.36ghz at 478mhz fsb completely annihilates performance wise anything I could run with lower fsb higher multiplier, even upto 3.6. The performance difference from the massive increase in bus bandwidth was something I couldn't have imagined unless I'd seen it myself. Clock frequency itself makes much less difference with Quad cores on Front Side Bus. It's a design that's reached its limits until you push the frequency way up towards 500MHz +

Edit: A quad core on FSB realizes its true potential within 5Mhz of hitting its FSB wall. My wall hits roughly about 482MHz. Btw wall isn't when it won't post, its when you can't maintain sync between both dies. I can post at 498MHz fsb, but the wall is much earlier.

[zowle]

What do you think guys. Will work better a Q6600 or a 8500? Both overcloked.

[RealTelstar]

I am working on GTA IV Performance preview...

Game is brutally limited by CPU, you can use Radeon HD4870 X2 or Tri-SLI, but fps will be the same like with single card.

When they will learn how to program???
This is unacceptable in 2009.

[Mad1723]

What do you think guys. Will work better a Q6600 or a 8500? Both overcloked.

Q6600, since it handles Quads better

[xsbb]

Q6600!

[MayDay84]

Here's my benchmark result with overclocked middle-end CPU and C2D:


When playing, it keeps about 35fps by Fraps when not much action going on.. Drops to somewhere 25fps at it's lowest..
Just wondering why i can't rise the texture rendering to high?!?!?!?

[gosh]

It definitely seems to be all about front side bus speed!

Maybe they are letting multiple threads access same memory and also writes to that memory. This is a situation that C2Q isn't able to handle well. When games are optimized for PC's I think it mostly is optimized to scale well on C2Q and also do the main work on two threads for C2D. C2Q don't like threads that talks to each other and shares resources, each thread should handle be as "single threaded" as possible.

If threads shares resources, then there will be a lot more FSB traffic.

[Vatos_locos]

it runs fine on me too

Q9450 @ 3.8Ghz
4850 @ 800/1100
4Gb Ram

Statistics
Average FPS: 42.45
Duration: 37.36 sec
CPU Usage: 52%
System memory usage: 70%
Video memory usage: 76%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Render Quality: High
View Distance: 45
Detail Distance: 100

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Ultimate
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
Video Driver version: 7.14.10.630
Audio Adapter: Speakers (SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz

File ID: benchmark.cli

[WaxCactus]

My Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz + 4GB Ram + 8800GT are doing 45fps on medium at resolution of 1680x1050 so i guess its fine only thing troubles me about this game is that i cant even put high so i could play on high
[if its not below 30fps that is]

[RPGWiZaRD]

I got suprised when a friend's new comp (he's not the overclocking kind of type so no OC) with a Q9550 @ stock 2.83GHz, GTX 280 @ stock and 2x2GB ram and he's doing 50~60 avg FPS (~35 fps minimum) @ 1920x1200 high quality.

Seems like Intel Yorkfield or i7 + Nvidia is doing best job at running this game currently.

[kiwi]

yep, i7 + gtx 2x0 + 4GB ram is doing pretty good