Do NOT buy GTA IV for PC

[Heresiarch]

Why do you all use Nvidia cards? I'm using a HD3850 card and have a pirated copy of GTAIV yet I'm not interested to install it because the huge size of it and I don't know if my card can run it at least decently.

 

[doctor_kaz]

This is a serious question:

What is it that makes GTA IV worse than San Andreas?.

It's full of filler and boring sim-life crap like taking your friends and girlfriends out on boring dates. These parts of the game are like grinding in an MMORPG. The previous games had more driving and gunplay-oriented missions. You could do stuff like buy business and do missions for them. They also had more random stuff to do and find around the city. And the games were funnier.

San Andreas actually started the trend of filling up the game with minigames and crap. The series peaked out at Vice City.

 

[Amateur]

...

What a complete load of bollocks. Go and check out the GTA forums and report back. If you do not find masses of people with excellent systems making similar complaints I will have to confirm the doctors report that you are retarded, sir.

The 8600 gt is better than the GPU's in the consoles, has more VRAM, better VRAM. And please do not even attempt to say that GTA4 has excellent graphics, it doesn't. There are many other games with superior graphics and better performance. The GTA PC port is simply atrocious. Stop blaming PC owners and start blaming Crapstar.

You really need to learn a lot of things before arguing the capabilities of GPUs...

So 8600 GT is better then Consoles because 8600 has more VRAM. woooooowww :D:D:D(This explains that you don't know anything about gpus but still I'll try to explain as simple as possible).So all the variables like shader processing power, pixell fillrate, vertex fillrate, memory bandwidth and so on give no infromation at all, we must instead look at the VRAM :D:D to compare gpus.

Read before comment, I did NOT say that the game doesn't have issues, I said 8600 gt is crap and with that card one can not comment on the playability of newly released games.


For the argument:

Let's take Xbox 360. Its gpu is somewhat better then X1950XT which is a much powerful then 8600gt(google for benchmarks, especially AA,AF enabled). But let's see how powerful that is compared to 8600GTS(yes instead of gt take the more powerful GTS).

Raw shader power of Xbox 360 GPU is 240 Gflops where 8600 GTS gets 139Gflops(Overclocked 8600gt should see around 125 - 130 Gflops). So theere is a big difference in terms of raw processing power but there are big architectural differences comparison is not very easy and this raw power difference means very little.

But we have a nice information which is that Xbox 360 is based on X1950XT and improved upon that structure(Like unified shaders etc.). So comparing X950XT with 8600GTS (I'm even comparing with the better GTS version instead of GT ) will pretty much show the better one:

Took this from tomshardware, there are more on the site, if oyu doubt you can check other benches too. They are old cards but with some googling you can find other tests.

Now, X1950XT is clearly %40-50 faster then 8600GTS, where with a 8600gt even with OC you will get a slightly worse results, and since Xbox 360 GPU is an improved(there are some drastic improvements) version of X1950XT then we conclude that 8600 gpu is INFERIOR to Xbox 360 and since PS3 has a similar performance it should also be inferior to PS3.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/x ... cations/p1

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8600.html

Better clock speeds. More (much, much more) vram, better everything actually.

First off, you can show where the Xbox360 has the card you are talking about, because it sure as hell isn't shown to have it in the link above. The thing the Xbox has looks like a piece of junk actually, especially compared to todays low to mid range cards on the PC. Nothing to get excited about, we are talking about 3 year old technology here.

 

[MetalCraze]

XBox360 is based on X1800. There was no X1950XT when XBox360 was finalised (aka beginning of 2005).
Also if by "drastic improvements" you mean that XBox360 vcard in fact acts as an integrated one by taking RAM because it does not have own VRAM then uh oh.
XBox360 has only 512 MBs of RAM which it shares with videocard which explains why XBox360 performance is crap (it can't run Mass Effect on resolution higher than 1280x720 without any AA, runs Halo 3 at 1024x640 and can't get more than 30 fps out of GoW because X360 is indeed very very weak - which also explains why GTA4 didn't go far from GTA SA in terms of graphics). The other thing is that it has DDR3 RAM but it doesn't save it much. Also DX10 is a big no-no for this "next-gen" console.
"Next-gen" buzzword was also very ironic considering that X360 technology was mostly current-gen or even obsolete when it came out.

 

[doctor_kaz]

XBox360 is based on X1800. There was no X1950XT when XBox360 was finalised (aka beginning of 2005).
Also if by "drastic improvements" you mean that XBox360 vcard in fact acts as an integrated one by taking RAM because it does not have own VRAM then uh oh.
XBox360 has only 512 MBs of RAM which it shares with videocard which explains why XBox360 performance is crap (it can't run Mass Effect on resolution higher than 1280x720 without any AA, runs Halo 3 at 1024x640 and can't get more than 30 fps out of GoW because X360 is indeed very very weak - which also explains why GTA4 didn't go far from GTA SA in terms of graphics). The other thing is that it has DDR3 RAM but it doesn't save it much. Also DX10 is a big no-no for this "next-gen" console.
"Next-gen" buzzword was also very ironic considering that X360 technology was mostly current-gen or even obsolete when it came out.

That's pretty much always true of consoles, but this generation has managed to keep its image of being "next-gen" and "cutting edge" a lot longer than the previous generations because pretty much every developer other than Crytek and GSC Gameworld has completely abandoned designing for PC hardware. Graphics used to leapfrog every year but that process has stopped. I'm not aware of a single game in development which trumps Crysis technologically

 

[Gragt]

I'm seriously starting to believe that the GTA IV pc situation was purposefuly engineered to deal another blow to pc gaming.

 

[DefJam101]

XBox360 is based on X1800. There was no X1950XT when XBox360 was finalised (aka beginning of 2005).
Also if by "drastic improvements" you mean that XBox360 vcard in fact acts as an integrated one by taking RAM because it does not have own VRAM then uh oh.
XBox360 has only 512 MBs of RAM which it shares with videocard which explains why XBox360 performance is crap (it can't run Mass Effect on resolution higher than 1280x720 without any AA, runs Halo 3 at 1024x640 and can't get more than 30 fps out of GoW because X360 is indeed very very weak - which also explains why GTA4 didn't go far from GTA SA in terms of graphics). The other thing is that it has DDR3 RAM but it doesn't save it much. Also DX10 is a big no-no for this "next-gen" console.
"Next-gen" buzzword was also very ironic considering that X360 technology was mostly current-gen or even obsolete when it came out.

That's pretty much always true of consoles, but this generation has managed to keep its image of being "next-gen" and "cutting edge" a lot longer than the previous generations because pretty much every developer other than Crytek and GSC Gameworld has completely abandoned designing for PC hardware. Graphics used to leapfrog every year but that process has stopped. I'm not aware of a single game in development which trumps Crysis technologically

Dead Island's engine (or modified engine) has some new technological features, like the layering of human bodies from skin/muscle/organs/bone. I don't know much about computer tech, though.

 

[Trash]

GTA4 is miles behind San Andreas. Easily the best of the games. And it's about niggers.

Though the missions in SA and VC are defenitely not as good/interesting as those in GTA4. Not to mention how they improved the combat in the latest installment. The way enemy ai behaves, weapons feel and how you can (and should!) finally use cover makes it miles better than how previous GTA's handled it. It really feels like a firefight now unlike the point and click affairs of the previous games. Shit, the game even has some C&C. For me it's defenitely the best game of 2008.

On the xbox that is. If they had optimised it a bit better and dumped the DRM it would also have trumped anything on the pc.

And I can finally play as a badly dressed Slav. Pure win.

 

[Dmitron]

snip

Rubbish

 

[Trash]

Thanks for clearing that up. You're right though, after a while you can buy better looking clothes for the Slav.

 

[Xor]

San Andreas was fun because you play a gangbanger who ends up doing all sorts of over-the-top action movie shit; assassinations, car chases, robbing a casino, driving a goddamn motorcycle up a goddamn jet while it's fucking taking off, stealing from a secret military base, the sort of shit.

I haven't played GTA4 yet, and it looks like I'll be passing over it entirely since it runs like ass on PCs.

 

[DefJam101]

GTA series, as a whole, would be better if they just turned it into a free-roaming action movie simulator. Like Mercenaries except with a sense of humor toward itself.

 

[MetalCraze]

San Andreas was fun because you play a gangbanger who ends up doing all sorts of over-the-top action movie shit; assassinations, car chases, robbing a casino, driving a goddamn motorcycle up a goddamn jet while it's fucking taking off, stealing from a secret military base, the sort of shit.

That's why San Andreas is so awesome. Too bad it also has unfunny filler.

I'm seriously starting to believe that the GTA IV pc situation was purposefuly engineered to deal another blow to pc gaming.

This will certainly lead to yet another retarded "technically xbox360 > PC" from mAss-media and xbawks retards are using it still considering that even a mid-range PC today is miles and miles ahead of last-gen xbawks tech with its "integrated" video capable only of castrated textures and shitty small locations because of the good ol' small RAM.

 

[Dmitron]

Hmm..I just discovered something while playing multiplayer. If you alt-tab..the game automatically disconnects you stating that it's running "too slow". Nice.

The multiplayer 1on1 deathmatch is actually a lot of fun.

 

[Amateur]

http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360-System-Specifications/p1

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8600.html

Better clock speeds. More (much, much more) vram, better everything actually.

First off, you can show where the Xbox360 has the card you are talking about, because it sure as hell isn't shown to have it in the link above. The thing the Xbox has looks like a piece of junk actually, especially compared to todays low to mid range cards on the PC. Nothing to get excited about, we are talking about 3 year old technology here.

Clock Speeds? Much much more? What more? Do you even know what you are comparing ? I'm trying to tell you that the way things are handled in a console GPU is much different then the way it is handled in your beloved 8600 and you can't compare 2-3 variables and say one is better. All you can do is to compare bandwidth or raw processing power which will still not be very meaningful. That's why I gave you the benchmarks because it is the only clearway for you to see which one will perform better.

About the clock speeds, I think you can understand the following example:

Take A card having 300 sp and each sp working on 700mhz while card B has 800 sp but each sp is working at 500mhz. You can't compare the clock speed and say A > B in fact B has much more processing power since 800 processors are working in parallel 800x500 > 700x300 (nearly twice the shader processing power).

VRAM ? It is nearly the most irrelevant variable for this comparison. There were Gforce 4 mx models having 128 mb of memory while 6600gt and many newer cards also came with 128mb. The two cards are light years away in technology, gforce mx doesn't even have the capability of pixel shader processing.

Yes if you are talking about cards having similar power and very high resolutions and AA AF the installed Vram may bottleneck, but the cards that you are trying to compare has many more bottlenecks before it comes down to this.

Again if you really want to know more on how GPU's of different firms work and such you should first got to a forum where there are people like to talk on GPUs. There are lots and lots of them out there. This is not engineering but still there are lots of things to consider/ learn before making judgements about two different GPUs. I don't have time to write detailed info here...

XBox360 is based on X1800. There was no X1950XT when XBox360 was finalised (aka beginning of 2005).
Also if by "drastic improvements" you mean that XBox360 vcard in fact acts as an integrated one by taking RAM because it does not have own VRAM then uh oh.
XBox360 has only 512 MBs of RAM which it shares with videocard which explains why XBox360 performance is crap (it can't run Mass Effect on resolution higher than 1280x720 without any AA, runs Halo 3 at 1024x640 and can't get more than 30 fps out of GoW because X360 is indeed very very weak - which also explains why GTA4 didn't go far from GTA SA in terms of graphics). The other thing is that it has DDR3 RAM but it doesn't save it much. Also DX10 is a big no-no for this "next-gen" console.
"Next-gen" buzzword was also very ironic considering that X360 technology was mostly current-gen or even obsolete when it came out.

It is not important if X1905xt released at the time of the XBOX finalization, in fact they are developed in paralell and a greater deal of time is spent on the Xbox 360 since it was a bigger fish for ATI.

One of the drastic changes is "UNIFIED SHADERS". Xbox 360 can use the same pipelines when processing pixel or vertex shaders while X1950XT has seperated both. This was a big improvement since the usage of the two types changed greatly by games and when you have them seperated while you could perform well in one game, in another one one type of shaders can bottleneck and you see a great performance decrease. Xbox 360 can easliy allocate its resources to the needed type and have a minimum bottleneck on the process.
Although it uses a shared 512 mb memory it is DDR3 and GPU , CPU have very fast access to it(The controller was in the GPU if I remember correctly), and that's why it is performing well above expectations. But I also aggree that this is still quite insufficient for the newer titles.
The DX10 argument is not relevant. Consoles do not use DX apis, they have their own. We should compare the effects which can be implemented and as far as I know all of the effects in DX10(which is a very little improvement on DX9 sm3.0) have already been implemented in consoles.


I'm NOT claiming that consoles great, and actually for the new games they are definitely NOT capable of giving good performance in high quality in resolutions like 1280x720 let alone 1920x1080, but for 200$ and the hassle freeness they are still a nice choice.

With a low cost pc you can easily get much much better gaming pefrormance today,(especially with the new cheap cards like HD 4850). The only thing I'm saying is that 8600 series is crap ...

 

[RainSong]

go away

 

[Ion Flux]

I'm seriously starting to believe that the GTA IV pc situation was purposefuly engineered to deal another blow to pc gaming.

This will certainly lead to yet another retarded "technically xbox360 > PC" from mAss-media and xbawks retards are using it still considering that even a mid-range PC today is miles and miles ahead of last-gen xbawks tech with its "integrated" video capable only of castrated textures and shitty small locations because of the good ol' small RAM.

Man, who cares. Good riddance to mainstream games sez me.

 

[Hümmelgümpf]

The only thing I'm saying is that nVidia cards are crap ...

Fixed. All hail ATI!

 

[MetalCraze]

in fact they are developed in paralell and a greater deal of time is spent on the Xbox 360 since it was a bigger fish for ATI.

Unified shaders are all cool but it isn't where we must look - XBox360 vcard loses in performance to the same X1950XT which does not have unified ones.
Don't forget that M$ used the most cheapest components there are to lower the price of X360 and unified shaders or not - performance is crap.

Although it uses a shared 512 mb memory it is DDR3 and GPU , CPU have very fast access to it(The controller was in the GPU if I remember correctly), and that's why it is performing well above expectations. But I also aggree that this is still quite insufficient for the newer titles.

I already wrote why it isn't sufficient even for Xbawks titles.
Will you say that even X1800 has troubles running GOW with a framerate higher than 30 in 1280x720?

Consoles do not use DX apis, they have their own.

XBox360 uses DX9.0c.

We should compare the effects which can be implemented and as far as I know all of the effects in DX10...

*Geometry shaders*
Yes man those little thingies that let you perform any operation with a 3d object, like adding more real 3D detail to it (like f.e. splitting a raindrop in two raindrops when it falls along with laws of physics) and not just bumpmapping without increasing the amount of polygons - only possible with DX10.

Now why M$ didn't release a DX9.0d or something with the possibility to use geometry shaders just to sell more Vista is another thing.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Trash is actually quite right about the fighting in GTA4. Come on, nobody here is going to seriously say that previous GTA games had good combat?

The bank robbery in this game; there was nothing like this in any previous GTA game, and I have observed this while watching other people play the previous GTA games and the main missions on them.

 

[MetalCraze]

Driving and combat were always shit in GTA games, it is everything else that isn't gameplay that made them great.

 

[Dmitron]

Trash is actually quite right about the fighting in GTA4. Come on, nobody here is going to seriously say that previous GTA games had good combat?

Yes, the fighting, shooting and driving are all improved and feel much more solid.

Those factors alone don't compel me to play the SP.

 

[Amateur]

...

I already wrote why it isn't sufficient even for Xbawks titles.
Will you say that even X1800 has troubles running GOW with a framerate higher than 30 in 1280x720?

Consoles do not use DX apis, they have their own.

XBox360 uses DX9.0c.

We should compare the effects which can be implemented and as far as I know all of the effects in DX10...

*Geometry shaders*
Yes man those little thingies that let you perform any operation with a 3d object, like adding more real 3D detail to it (like f.e. splitting a raindrop in two raindrops when it falls along with laws of physics) and not just bumpmapping without increasing the amount of polygons - only possible with DX10.

Now why M$ didn't release a DX9.0d or something with the possibility to use geometry shaders just to sell more Vista is another thing.

I didn't see a benchmark for GOW with X1800 series, and I doubt that it will give above 30 fps all the time under highest settings with AA and AF enabled for 1280x720.


Xbox 360's api is based on DX since it is developed by Microsoft BUT I don't think it is exactly DX9.c. Are you sure of this? The problem with console APIs are as you may know, they are developed for a spesific GPU, and since the gpu always stay the same they have as spesific commands as possible to utilize whatever the gpu has. On the other hand since the gpu models change a lot even for the same brand, the API's are written much more genericly for compatibility. I maybe wrong for Xbox...


Yeah geometry shaders are promising BUT I have yet to see them making a difference in a game(not saying it won't, saying that current games do not use them enough). Moreover for techniques like Tesselation which is based on geometry shaders included in DX10.1 which is NOT supported by a lot of cards supporting Dx10(All of the Nvidia ones and 2000 series Ati cards) which means that Dx10 still has a long way to go to make a difference.

 

[Amateur]

Driving and combat were always shit in GTA games, it is everything else that isn't gameplay that made them great.

Agreed. But this new combat is quite fun and it is far better then the previous GTA's. Driving is also got a lot better and now I even enjoy stupid fedex missions. Also the game got a lot slower (but this is good).

Don't know you guys but I think (except the performance issues) GTA 4 is a great improvement over the previous ones and as far as I see it has most of the good qualities of the previous ones.