GTA 3 & Simcity 4 issues with current computer hardware

[Lordberek]

GTA 3 jerky on my Geforce 3 and my friends Geforce 4. Why is it jerky? Not laggy, but jerky, like when I don't have my AGP drivers updated, games will jerk every second... GTA 3 does this even though both our systems are updated with latest hardware, Windows XP and drivers updates. I have to turn down the resolution to 1024x768 and 16bit color to make the jerkyness go away. I still don't feel the game is being perfectly smooth even after this. If I have it at 1280x1024 at 32bit color, it will be extensively jerky, then after I drive around the city for while it will go away somewhat, but not a lot (the 2nd island is worse than the 1st).

Is this simply bad programming on GTA3 part? I have no other games that are like this... wait, Simcity 4 is completely laggy, not jerky but just simply laggy (could be same thing though, different inteface so hard to compare). No reason when the game just doesn't seem that intesive for graphics... yet after a short time Simcity 4 will just CRAWL.

I have 1.5 plus ghz systems... 512 megs ram, decent hard drives WD1200JB. I don't understand why these two games have issues. Will a Radeon 9700 solve my problems over my Geforce 3 and Geforce 2's? Is this my missing link over these two poorly programmed games? Or will nothing I do really help in these respects.

I am currently waiting for the new ATI and Nvidia lines to come out, then once the price drops below $200US for a Radeon 9700, I'm going to pick two of them up.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated. Thnx.

[Tahir2]

Sim City 4 crawls on my P4 2.4GHz @ 2.7GHz + R9700Pro fairly qiuckly as the city complexity grows. I believe it is CPU limited (ton of AI going on) so a Radeon 9700 Pro wont help much.

GTA 3 I have no idea about.

[Riptides]

Yes, GTA3 is a dog on a PC system almost regardless of the specs you are running.
One problem is that there is a replay function that constantly records the last ~10 seconds of gameplay and is shown using one of the Function keys.. like F2 or so. This is what is beleived to be the biggest problem with the games jerkiness, the fact that its always flushing and saving the last few seconds of gameplay.

[BenSkywalker]

GTA3 has a bug in it regarding AGP aperture that causes it to stutter like hell if it is set too high. Go in to your BIOS and drop the setting down as low as you can get it. I had the same problem previously and after dropping it down to 4MB the game was playing quite smoothly on my GHZ/GF2/512MB setup(although I haven't tried it on my current build yet). This is a bug in the game, it is documented on Take2's website somewhere IIRC(I got the information off either Rockstar's or T2's site). IIRC my framerate was in the upper 30s lower 40s constantly after applying the fix on a rig that was a decent amount slower then what you have now and that was running 12x9x32.

I would also reccomend disabling trails, once you get the framerate up over 30 on a constant basis they are far more annoying then anything IMO. Can't help with SimCity4 except to say that pretty much everyone I have seen is having the same problem with the game.

[StellaArtois]

A fix that definitely worked for me - GF3 64Mb, Athlon1.4Gig, Abit KT7A, 512Mb ram with GTA3 - was with a program that forced the use of software T&L. Framerates smoothed right out.

And for the life of me I can't remember the name of the program... :x

EDIT: Hmmm, seems to be 3DAnalyze - doh! This was the linked version I used for GTA3 ages ago, no doubt a newer version is out by now (well, definitely is - I downloaded it for that Matrox Reef demo fix) :)

http://www.magenheimer.com/gta3help/GTA3pc_smoothness_fix.rar