Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 I edited the commandline in gta4 to prevent restrictions on performance capping to see what the result would be. I anticipated that exceeding the recommendations for my system would cause a noticeable slowdown. When in fact just the opposite occured. I experienced better visual quality with similar to slightly higher FPS even though I apparently exceeded my "alloted memory usage by 1000 points". Everything was MAXED. My system even ran cooler by 5-10c. My question is, why by R* settings are we restricted to such a small allocation when there doesn't appear to be any side-effects to playing systems? Am I putting my setup at risk by going so far over the "red line"? Is this Rockstar's idea of quality control to keep the experience on-par with consoles while suggesting we need to upgrade our systems to meet heir standards necessary for the highest settings? My specs: Geforce 8800GT 512mb Q6600 2.4ghz quad core 2gb memory windows xp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadDevil Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 Could it be that you graphics card is borrowing system RAM? I know nVidia 7+ cards have this feature but can't remember if its Vista Only or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 Could it be that you graphics card is borrowing system RAM? I know nVidia 7+ cards have this feature but can't remember if its Vista Only or not. Maybe. Im not completely savvy on how these things work. If my gpu was borrowing resources could it potentially damage the video card by putting so much strain? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CharmingCharlie Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 You will not damage your system if the memory card "borrows" ram from the system memory, think about it for a second Laptops have been doing it for nearly decade. If you exceed the video ram limits it just means you can probably expect missing or slowly loading textures because the ram is full. However there is absolutely no chance in a month of Sundays that you will actually damage the graphics card. A GPU can only be damaged by improper overclocking or not enough cooling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 You will not damage your system if the memory card "borrows" ram from the system memory, think about it for a second Laptops have been doing it for nearly decade. If you exceed the video ram limits it just means you can probably expect missing or slowly loading textures because the ram is full. However there is absolutely no chance in a month of Sundays that you will actually damage the graphics card. A GPU can only be damaged by improper overclocking or not enough cooling. Thanks for the reply. I had no idea laptops worked like that. Slowly loading textures is exactly what I experienced despite the performance. Any way to boost allotted memory to GTA without hindering the rest of my system? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liftow Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 You will not damage your system if the memory card "borrows" ram from the system memory, think about it for a second Laptops have been doing it for nearly decade. If you exceed the video ram limits it just means you can probably expect missing or slowly loading textures because the ram is full. However there is absolutely no chance in a month of Sundays that you will actually damage the graphics card. A GPU can only be damaged by improper overclocking or not enough cooling. Thanks for the reply. I had no idea laptops worked like that. Slowly loading textures is exactly what I experienced despite the performance. Any way to boost allotted memory to GTA without hindering the rest of my system? I have been surfing forums looking for an answer to this very question..I'm running Q6600, 8800gts @ 640mb and 2 gig ocz on vista 32 bit. I have the settings cranked to the max with car density on 55. I'm getting 32 to 35 fps with the only hitch coming after an hour or so from what some are calling a memory leak (which happens when I keep the resource usage in the green as well). My system is using 1.6 gigs of ram, and the cpu usage is around 95 percent across all 4 cores distributed pretty much equally. The resource usage counter in game says I'm 1440/613 over!!! My performance is BETTER exceeding what the game lists as my available resources..something is not right here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 It played better for me too. I reverted to the medium/highest settings for the sake of visual quality (to prevent pop-in textures) This really comes down to an issue of poor optimization on behalf of R*. I hope the patch cleans some things up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liftow Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 It played better for me too. I reverted to the medium/highest settings for the sake of visual quality (to prevent pop-in textures) This really comes down to an issue of poor optimization on behalf of R*. I hope the patch cleans some things up. Yeah, I just noticed some popins too when I went to a residential area - bushes trees etc. I reduced the draw distance down to 55 and it still says its 900/613 but the draw distance looks good. That and the high res textures take away some of the aliasing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PanzerIV Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 Good job stupid thread starter who doesn't say how to edit in the console the game to bypass the limit... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chevyboy Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 Good job stupid thread starter who doesn't say how to edit in the console the game to bypass the limit... What? Are you braindead or just ignorant? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themasher729 Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 thats b/c its been put in about 20 posts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 Good job stupid thread starter who doesn't say how to edit in the console the game to bypass the limit... commandline.txt f*ck face Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 You will not damage your system if the memory card "borrows" ram from the system memory, think about it for a second Laptops have been doing it for nearly decade. If you exceed the video ram limits it just means you can probably expect missing or slowly loading textures because the ram is full. However there is absolutely no chance in a month of Sundays that you will actually damage the graphics card. A GPU can only be damaged by improper overclocking or not enough cooling. Thanks for the reply. I had no idea laptops worked like that. Slowly loading textures is exactly what I experienced despite the performance. Any way to boost allotted memory to GTA without hindering the rest of my system? I have been surfing forums looking for an answer to this very question..I'm running Q6600, 8800gts @ 640mb and 2 gig ocz on vista 32 bit. I have the settings cranked to the max with car density on 55. I'm getting 32 to 35 fps with the only hitch coming after an hour or so from what some are calling a memory leak (which happens when I keep the resource usage in the green as well). My system is using 1.6 gigs of ram, and the cpu usage is around 95 percent across all 4 cores distributed pretty much equally. The resource usage counter in game says I'm 1440/613 over!!! My performance is BETTER exceeding what the game lists as my available resources..something is not right here. This is pretty hard to find and the more I play the more it becomes apparent that I need to find a solution. I maxed everything an dropped the draw distance to 0 (which doesn't take away distant buildings so no loss) and I'm about 580/480. Another 100-200 points would make all the difference to me since this game is BEAUTIFUL. Any luck? There has to be an ini or a config somewhere that has this setting. I remember some games can be edited via registry to allot more resources. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 I found these settings in "stream.ini"? virtual 204800 physical 204800 virtual_optimised 204800 physical_optimised 204800 are they relevant? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 -availablevidmem: Set amount of physical Video Memory(ex. -availablevidmem 0.9) -percentvidmem: Percentage of video memory to make available to GTA This may be what I'm looking for... numbers are a tad confusing "0.9" but I'll screw around with them and see what occcurs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 Success! I think... setting -availablevidmem to 1.5 in the commandline gave me 723 units of memory. I haven't thoroughly tested the results in game but it looks promising. Im just being careful here, but I'm not comprimising my system by putting the memory too high am I? How high is too high? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liftow Posted December 7, 2008 Share Posted December 7, 2008 Yeah i just tried the availablevidmem command. It does take away the restriction in the usage monitor and shows you have more memory, and as well the benchmark will show my video memory usage as 87 percent now as opposed to 100. It appears that the benchmark tool is inadequate at best. However I get really bad hitching and stuttering after about a minute of using this command even though I haven't changed my settings. I'm still using the same resources as before (when it was saying i was 1000/613 or whatever, but using this command give me 1000/928) but the performance is horrible. Too bad this game doesn't seem to be making use of the .35 gigs of memory sitting idle, or of the 4 gigs of paging file that I have on my other two drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jops Posted December 7, 2008 Author Share Posted December 7, 2008 Yeah i just tried the availablevidmem command. It does take away the restriction in the usage monitor and shows you have more memory, and as well the benchmark will show my video memory usage as 87 percent now as opposed to 100. It appears that the benchmark tool is inadequate at best. However I get really bad hitching and stuttering after about a minute of using this command even though I haven't changed my settings. I'm still using the same resources as before (when it was saying i was 1000/613 or whatever, but using this command give me 1000/928) but the performance is horrible. Too bad this game doesn't seem to be making use of the .35 gigs of memory sitting idle, or of the 4 gigs of paging file that I have on my other two drives. I had mixed results aswell. I did 3.0 to try a maxed out 1430/1480 and the FPS went really low and I started seeing graphical anomalies. However, a comfortable 540-700 allows me to have texture and render on high and highest while draw distance is on 0 to remove my texture pop-in problems without sacrificing performance. So a success for me (so far) I didn't even toy with the GPU memory command. I have no idea what the default setting even is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xmaners10 Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 Where do i edit Commandline parameters anyways? sorry for being the clueless one here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CharmingCharlie Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 Where do i edit Commandline parameters anyways? sorry for being the clueless one here There is a useful guide on how to use the commandlines in the FAQ on this forum, here is a direct link to the guide :- http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtop...entry1058959070 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xmaners10 Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 hmmm.... i have a question, I followed exactly what the guide said but when i launch "LaunchGTAIV.exe" I try exceeding the restrictions but it's still restricted help? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CharmingCharlie Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 GTA 4 can be an odd beast at the best of times, I have noticed on occasions if you create the commandline.txt file it totally ignores it. Try deleting the commandline.txt you created and create a new one again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xmaners10 Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 (edited) Oh Nice man i made it work but one last question, is there a possibility that if i use this 12 hours a day and maxed out all the settings and used all of my vram and those other things can damage my ram, graphics card or infact anything at all? Edited May 30, 2010 by xmaners10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slowride Posted May 30, 2010 Share Posted May 30, 2010 Oh Nice man i made it work but one last question, is there a possibility that if i use this 12 hours a day and maxed out all the settings and used all of my vram and those other things can damage my ram, graphics card or infact anything at all? No. Your hardware is made to be ran. If its sitting there idle doing nothing its a waste. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xmaners10 Posted May 31, 2010 Share Posted May 31, 2010 (edited) Guys what do i need to make my fps faster and use all of my system mem and vmem? Here are my benchies Statistics Average FPS: 14.47 Duration: 37.46 sec CPU Usage: 97% System memory usage: 65% Video memory usage: 47% Graphics Settings Video Mode: 1024 x 768 (60 Hz) Texture Quality: High Shadow Quality: Medium Reflection Resolution: Low Water Quality: Medium Texture Filter Quality: Anisotropic x4 Night Shadows: Off View Distance: 1 Detail Distance: 50 Hardware Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT Video Driver version: 190.45 Audio Adapter: Realtek HD Audio output Intel® Core2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz And these are my current commandlines -nomemrestrict -availablevidmem 3.0 -norestrictions -percentvidmem 100 Edited May 31, 2010 by xmaners10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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