Hi.
I just bought a new pc , an i7-4790k CPU , GTX970 and 16gb of ram, and i wanted to replay some games that i could only play with limited fidelity at the time.
So i tried GTA 4 ,but i couldn't get it to work at decent frame rates, it runs much worse than it did on my old pc
(GTX 460, AMD phenom x955 and 4gb ram).
Tried every run parameter i found but nothing really helped.
Any idea how to make it run smoothly?
How about the hard drive, is it doing ok? Anything n running i n the background?
I'm running an SSD, that can't be an issue, everything else runs fine and loads very fast.
What about background tasks? Is this version the steam version of the game? If so do a file check with the steam client.
Yep, it's the steam version. There's nothing running in the background. I did a file check already.
Drivers all up to date? I recall on my 550tis games being slow with the windows driver.
yep, i've got geforce experience installed, and it keeps the driver update.
Also, i don't really think that this is a general , system wide issue, since everything else runs great.
I've got the game at home I'll give it a shot maybe a 970 issue?
Well, it is a possibility, Thanks in advance!
Sorry for the off topic question, but does the steam version of GTA IV require Windows Games for live and Rockstar social club bullshit to play?
Yes.
Sadly, yes...
It is a 970 issue it seems. The card is so OP that GTA4 just doesn't like it. Maybe tied to the 3.5GB RAM issue by chance?
Image of the error message in the graphics setting of the game.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=411036864
it's a known bug with cards more than 2gb but it's easy to overcome, just start it with this parameter:
-availablevidmem 2.0
It sucks but I would not worry about it GTA4 was an abysmal port. And seems to have a lot of issues with new hardware. It won't even recognise my 290.
Unless you really really want to play it I would just skip it.
But if you do want to play it check out the PCGamingWiki page on GTA4.
It is not the vram bug, I have the same issue with my GTX 780. The game runs like shit even at lowest settings. 20 FPS my ass. I gave up though to my understanding, there are some active mods that improve performance. I havent found them yet though. I just gave up.
Answer:
GTA IV works better with older hardware, trust me, i've put thousunds of hours into this game, it's just very bad on PC.
What version of Windows are you running?
I have a somewhat similar setup. i7 4790K, 32 GB RAM, and GTX 770, running on Windows 8.1 64-bit.
I just benchmarked 2 minutes with FRAPS and got:
Min: 45
Max: 102
Avg: 67
I am also using max settings at 1080p.
Doesn't GTA IV have a problem with hyper-threading?
have you tried to run the game in compatibility mode? Some games work a little better like that, just throwing out an idea. Also there are ways to set up a certain config file for GTA4 to just utilize x amount of hardware. I would definitely read up on the GTA4 modding community forums, when i was playing GTA4 i had to circumvent options through a .cfg file and i was able to tell the game that i only had 2gb of vram...this was when i had a dual 3gb 6970 config.