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Do NOT buy GTA IV for PC

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
Avoid it like a plague.

See, I didn't actually have any interest in this game, but my brother bought it, because he wanted to play it. I checked over him playing it on my PC, and I can confirm that this is

the most unoptimized game you will ever play in your life.

Skyway was bloody spot on right about Rockstar. They have absolutely no clue how to program their games properly for PC.

Let me just tell you how badly unoptimized this game is.

Crysis runs properly on my PC on mix of Medium and High settings. Crysis Warhead runs even better on my PC at slightly better settings. Neverwinter Nights 2 runs properly on my PC on moderately high settings. Bioshock runs like a beauty.

But GTA IV, a game which was made for consoles, machines that have far less processing power than a mid-range PC, struggles to perform at low settings and low resolution. I check the memory usage, and it is really pushing it. It is at a sluggish framerate.

I mean, if I check the Vista game rating section, it shows that GTA IV requires more processing power than Crysis or Neverwinter Nights 2 (The latter are 3.0-5.0 while GTA IV is 4.5-5.0. And I have a 5.2 PC). The recommended requirements for the game are 1GB RAM, GeForce 7900, Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz. I have 2GB RAM, Geforce 8600, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz. It exceeds recommended requirements by a mile. And yet even that is not enough.

And those recommended requirements, I hardly think that those are the kind of requirements a console port is supposed to have. Let alone exceed that of the most technologically advanced PC game out there.

Man, it has really been ruining my brother. Strange enough, it was selling very cheaply at stores. $10, if you can believe it. A throwaway game at a throwaway price. :roll:
 

Dmitron

Arbiter
Joined
Sep 9, 2006
Messages
1,918
Remember to set all detail sliders to between 10 and 20.. That's what the consoles are set to. The engine can't handle more than that. Should never have included higher settings for PC.

It's a very average game. San Andreas was better and had more variety.
 
Joined
Nov 1, 2008
Messages
7,953
Location
Cuntington Manor
It was totally screwed up somehow and the port is a total joke. I have lost all interest in the game, unless they bring out a "finished" edition one day. Absolutely pathetic.
 

A user named cat

Guest
What specific 8600 card do you have? You realize that you probably aren't exceeding the recommended requirements, don't you Wyrm?

It basically goes like this: 7900GTX > 7900GT > 8600GTS > 7900GS = 8600GT. Sometimes it depends on the game, but obviously GTA doesn't like your card and is chewing it up. Some people say they get decent performance with the latest beta drivers+patch, but it is still optimized poorly. They'll probably have it fixed up sometime this year, or someone will make a custom update. GTA is too popular for it to just be left as is.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,048
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I torrented it just because I wanted to play a GTA game and heard this was kinda fun. Man, this was the first game I ever deleted from my hard disk after downloading. Seriously, the performance is so fucking horrible and I can't even set my settings higher than 22 or so. If I try increasing view distance past that point, it just jumps back. What the fuck, can't even *try* fiddling with the settings to see what I like best. And you can't even change the keys. No sir, it's all fixed. If you don't like the controls... well, bad luck, can't change that. Also the DRM is a fucking chore. I'm so happy I didn't legally buy it because legally activating your copy requires installing two additional programs [Games for Windows LIVE and Rockstar Social Club or how that shit is called] and signing up at one of them. It's really annoying. And then this shit is 12 Gigabytes large. And the graphics don't look like anything special, but still the game runs worse than Fallout 3 on max settings. And that is on medium settings. I can't even activate the high settings. What the fuck.

Every dollar you pay for the PC version of this game is too much. Heck, every cent, even. This plays like an alpha version without *any* optimization. It's probably bugged, too. I didn't get far enough in the game to encounter any bugs, though. I'm lucky I didn't buy it. I even regret downloading that piece of crap. I could've downloaded something that actually works during the time I downloaded this. Most games that look twice as good and are twice as complex as this require only half the system specs to run than this. Holy fuck. Unplayable, except if you have a PC from 2009. Oh wait we don't have 2009 yet.
 

Talby

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 15, 2008
Messages
5,507
Codex USB, 2014
You can change the controls for keyboard and mouse, just not for a controller. I have a quad core thingy and a GeForce 9800 and it still ran pretty poorly some of the time on lowish settings. Bugs weren't so bad, I got the occasional crash like I do with most games.

My brother had a lot of trouble with it, and can't get the thing to run for more than about an hour before the framerate becomes a slideshow. Multiplayer was a crash on launch every time, which sucks because we wanted to play over the LAN. Must be some memory leak or something.

A very crap port.
 

MaskedMan

very cool
Patron
Joined
Jan 9, 2008
Messages
1,864,628
Codex 2012 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
MY ADVENTURE IN LIBERTY CITY:

zomgfj8.jpg

driving sux when the city is invisible :(

carsdb4.jpg

when i came to the party everyone had the same car as me. i was soooo emberassed :oops: :oops:

dollqq3.jpg

in rough parts of town u may be accosted by dollmen. one of them folded himself over his middle and enterd my car HALP :o

pixieszn4.jpg

fortunately i was saved by faeries :) like in zelda! :)

palpatinego5.jpg

dont wave that lightsaber in my face jerkass :x :x

gta4fi8.jpg

wtf
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
It's a GeForce 8600 GT. But no, I am not the one playing the game. It's my brother. I merely noticed the terrible performance.

And yeah, there's lots of preliminaries to the actual game before you even start playing it. You have to register in Social Club, register in GFWL, and then update both of them. Thank goodness it was not a game I was interested in. My brother spent hours at the computer sorting this stuff out.
 

WalterKinde

Scholar
Joined
Dec 27, 2006
Messages
524
Even with a 8600gt it shouldn't look terrible as it does.
It may not be a top of the line gpu but considering what is powering a 360 and PS3. 8600gt should be adequate.
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
Apparently, with the shitty way the graphics work in the pc port, when you choose a bigger resolution the game tries to produce it in such a retarded manner that it eats up too much resources.

I've found a workararound here that has helped me achieve a decent graphic quality with acceptable FPS.

However, the absolutely ridiculous thing is that the game does not support AA (you can't even force it) and it has the most horribly looking shadows I've seen. I would gladly disable them , but guess what , you can't.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
MaskedMan said:
when i came to the party everyone had the same car as me. i was soooo emberassed :oops: :oops:

That is pretty common in the series now, its a minor bug that can be helpful enough when you want to have a certain car in another color.

There are worst things that can happen on that safe house, such as losing a car because of the idiot driving AI hitting it and move it away from the parking space or because there is a scripted cop chase and cops and the police can "steal" your car (or the police squad car hits the car and removed it from parking space).
 
Joined
Nov 1, 2008
Messages
7,953
Location
Cuntington Manor
ghostdog said:
Apparently, with the shitty way the graphics work in the pc port, when you choose a bigger resolution the game tries to produce it in such a retarded manner that it eats up too much resources.

I've found a workararound here that has helped me achieve a decent graphic quality with acceptable FPS.

However, the absolutely ridiculous thing is that the game does not support AA (you can't even force it) and it has the most horribly looking shadows I've seen. I would gladly disable them , but guess what , you can't.

:lol:

I would love to meet the retards that did this port. I really would.
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
GTA IV shadows are ugly as hell. And it has the most painful HDR lighting I have seen.

inwoker said:
Wyrmlord said:
Why would somebody buy that piece of shit?
Dude, mid-2007 it was so tempting, considering the price.

The 8800s were 3 times as expensive.

And I had only intended to catch up on 2006 and pre-2006 games, (though even newer games like Bioshock and World In Conflict ran perfectly at highest settings). It was more for gaining back the years I lost rather than preparing for the future. For the games that I wanted to play, it was perfect.

Besides, does it matter when even new-age games run well enough on it? For all that talk about the system usage of Crysis, it looked and ran great on my PC. I just turned off the awful-looking motion blur which also ate up resources. And that's it.

Is it so wrong for a man to get a low-end card that is adequate, rather than wanting the best? After all, games for me are only a way of passing a little time. I generally don't play much on weekdays, and play for an hour or so on a weekend, and that's it.

Also consider that much of my time is spent on DOSbox games as well. It would be a grave tragedy to drop big money on a 8800, and yet only use such a computer for playing DOS games.
 

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