[PC] Grand Theft Auto IV

[pjbliverpool]

GTA4 is both very similar and very different from San Andreas. What did you most enjoy about SA?

Everything pretty much, the freedom, the huge world, the "living world" nature of the game, the story, the gameplay!

I know 4 is a lot more restrictive in terms of its world size but i'm hoping pretty much everything else is intact.

Regarding controls, as its a GfW title, I expect it will mirror the 360's controls if you have a 360 pad. I'll let you know how the pad works next week.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Yeah, no lock on with the mouse. My only complaint with the controls is that the camara driving in FPS mode has some nastly mouse accel such that slow movements don't move the view at all and it takes rather swift jerk to adjust your view/aim.


As for performance, in Vista64 I couldn't keep the game from dipping well into the 20s even when lowering all the options, but I switched to XP and now the game runs well. For comparison sake:



My CPU isn't really Xeon though of course, it's an E8500@3.8GHz.

There's quite a significant difference in the settings used there though. How does it fair with identical settings in XP and Vista? I only have Vista so i'm afraid i'm going to be stuck either way!

 

[AlNom]

Anyone try it with a quad core?

 

[Neb]

Anyone try it with a quad core?

The game is very bugged, some user with Quad-cores gets lower results in benchmark than what I get with more detail. I read in a news site that there is a patch in the works to fix problems users are having. Strange becouse the CPU utilisation % is lower on theirs.

 

[pjbliverpool]

The game is very bugged, some user with Quad-cores gets lower results in benchmark than what I get with more detail. I read in a news site that there is a patch in the works to fix problems users are having. Strange becouse the CPU utilisation % is lower on theirs.

Beleive it or not, some people are getting MORE performance when they turn UP the graphical settings!

Check out that link I posted a couple of pages back, there are quite a few benchies in there.

 

[Neb]

Beleive it or not, some people are getting MORE performance when they turn UP the graphical settings!

Check out that link I posted a couple of pages back, there are quite a few benchies in there.

Oh man I believe you becouse it applies to me to!

 

[pjbliverpool]

Some very interesting results in this thread:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17948615&page=3

Seems one guy is getting 40-50 fps scores with only a 3870 and pretty decent settings (50fps @ 1920x1200).

I think there are two aspects to this, 1) He has the draw distance set quite reasonably and 2) He has a very powerful CPU.

I have a feeling this game could be hevily CPU limited and in a lot of cases, thats whats causing the low performance as opposed to GPU capability.

That could also go some way to explaining why performance can go up - or at least not get any worse as graphcal settings are increased.

I'm looking forward to a good CPU review of this game.

 

[Neb]

Thanks for the link Pjb.

Not sure if I am going to gloat over my CPU/GPU vs Quad-core or cry.

Statistics
Average FPS: 35.40
Duration: 37.06 sec
CPU Usage: 92%
System memory usage: 67%
Video memory usage: 67%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1280 x 1024 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: Medium
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 65
Detail Distance: 100
Vechicle Density: 100
Shadow Density: 16

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Home Premium
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
Video Driver version: 7.14.10.618
Audio Adapter: Creative SB X-Fi
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

But the weird thing about that is that i've seen people post their cpu usage and on Quad systems 3 cores arnt getting above 60% so it doesnt seem as the cpu gets used that heavy either you'd think.

 

[pjbliverpool]

But the weird thing about that is that i've seen people post their cpu usage and on Quad systems 3 cores arnt getting above 60% so it doesnt seem as the cpu gets used that heavy either you'd think.

I think it varies a lot by what settings your using. I would expect vehicle density and draw distance to have a pretty big effect on CPU usage. I've seen some benchmarkswere even quads are coming in at over 70% but in general, even very fast dual cores are in the 80's or 90's.

My theory is that the game actually wants 3 cores so that the threads can work in the same way as with Xenon. Thats why a dual is coming up short but a quad seems underutilised.

The recomended specs also list a Phenom X3 alongside the Intel quads which makes you think that the 4th core is almost superflouous for this game.

 

[obonicus]

Everything pretty much, the freedom, the huge world, the "living world" nature of the game, the story, the gameplay!

I know 4 is a lot more restrictive in terms of its world size but i'm hoping pretty much everything else is intact.

4 is less varied, but the world isn't that much smaller. It's a lot denser, there's actually a lot more to it. The city is easily the best part of the game. The gameplay has changed dramatically. It's a lot less 'gamey'.

I'm actually curious about what you'll think of the game.

 

[Skrying]

GTA IV takes itself so seriously you can laugh at it sometimes. That was my biggest issue, it's like Rockstar forgot why people loved the series besides the open world aspect. It should have been obvious considering the number of other open world games that have failed for being to serious and lacking style. I might some day pick this up for PC but not till it's about $20.

 

[kyleb]

There's quite a significant difference in the settings used there though. How does it fair with identical settings in XP and Vista? I only have Vista so i'm afraid i'm going to be stuck either way!

I didn't mean for my results to show the difference between Nebula's Vista results and my XP results, just for compariison framerates between whatever setups and settings people are playing at in general.

At least on my setup, the benchmark results are about the same between in both XP and Vista 64. However, in gameplay I'm consistantly getting a good 5-10fps better in XP in the same spots that are dipping into the 20s in Vista64 even when using far lower settings on the latter.

y theory is that the game actually wants 3 cores so that the threads can work in the same way as with Xenon. Thats why a dual is coming up short but a quad seems underutilised.

I'm guessing it is just system bus satuation, all the cores in the world won't help if you don't have the system bus to feed them.

 

[digitalwanderer]

AA!

 

[Neb]

AA!

+1000, period.

 

[homerdog]

So it can't even be forced?

 

[pjbliverpool]

I didn't mean for my results to show the difference between Nebula's Vista results and my XP results, just for compariison framerates between whatever setups and settings people are playing at in general.

At least on my setup, the benchmark results are about the same between in both XP and Vista 64. However, in gameplay I'm consistantly getting a good 5-10fps better in XP in the same spots that are dipping into the 20s in Vista64 even when using far lower settings on the latter.


I'm guessing it is just system bus satuation, all the cores in the world won't help if you don't have the system bus to feed them.

If that was the case though quads would fare no better than the duals since they both work on the same bus.

 

[digitalwanderer]

So it can't even be forced?

Not anyway I've found on either ATi or nVidia hardware, and I've been F-ING trying!

 

[Neb]

Not anyway I've found on either ATi or nVidia hardware, and I've been F-ING trying!

If you find way then tell me becouse this game badly needs it. Also I cant mod the damn thing. It has some kind of checksum verification for the files so I cant mess with it.

 

[kyleb]

If that was the case though quads would fare no better than the duals since they both work on the same bus.

I'm suggesting the situation could be that while the quads fair better because they do have enough processing power to make the FSB the limiting factor, duals like mine apparently don't as both my cores are generally maxed out.