Understanding Your Bottleneck

[Sethos]

Disclaimer: This is no miracle guide containing brilliant tweaks and fixes, this is just a guide to understanding information presented to you so you can optimize your performance. Many people miss this very obvious information

 

 

Hello,

 

This is just another thread in a sea of threads concerning GTA IV's horrible performance, though I'd like to make this a tiny guide which may help a handful of people out there. Ever since the release I have seen various threads and posts on many forums like, "I upgraded my GPU and it didn't help!", "This game is weird, changing resolution doesn't change the FPS!!" and along those lines.

 

I'd like to give you a nice guide-string on how to improve your performance or what to upgrade in case that's your plan.

 

First of all you need to run a simple In-game benchmark through the graphics menu with the the same settings you would use when playing the game, don't have a movie player running in the background which hogs up CPU cycles or doing something that hogs memory - Just do a clean benchmark.

 

When that is done, you are presented with four pieces of information;

 

FPS, CPU Usage, System Memory Usage and Video Memory Usage. We need to focus on 3 latter ones. Most people tend to ignore these numbers because they probably don't mean much but they are quite important to understanding where the bottleneck lies. This game was made as a horrible port and they didn't have a system to shift to load to each component, rather have all 3 components do each their work, when the limit is reached so is the FPS roof.

 

As I said, run the benchmark and look at the percentage numbers and most people will perhaps see a single one of them is in the 90's which means the game has maxed out that component.

 

Here's my example, I ran the bencmark and got numbers like these;

 

CPU Usage: 94%

System Memory Usage: 60%

Video Memory Usage: 82%

 

As you see, my FPS is limited by my CPU and thus I have 3 solutions; Free up CPU cycles by closing down Windows applications using CPU, upgrade to a faster CPU or overclock, I chose the last one. I overclocked a mere 350MHz which gave me a 12 FPS boost!

 

Now my benchmark stats looked like this;

 

CPU Usage: 85%

System Memory Usage: 60%

Video Memory Usage: 95%

 

Now my GPU is the roof, the choices are to decrease the settings in the Control Panel of the GPU itself, overclock the card, upgrade. You also need to turn down Graphicals settings using up Video Memory, like Texture Res., resolution, View Distance etc.

 

 

I ran the benchmark again and just by decreasing a few settings I gained another 8 FPS Boost .

 

So by using information to my advantage I gained 20FPS which set me from an 12 Average FPS In-game to 32 with little to no decrease in the actual visual quality of the game.

[rampage13]

Its really fokked up.

it is just too cpu hungry, I mean if you can play it on a xbox360 which has a 3200+amd cpu and get 25+fps,

I should could get at least the same speeds with all settings on low and res 800*600.

 

This game is a waste of freakn money, maybe in about 3 years when i upgrade my pc its do-able.

 

 

 

 

 

SERIOUS!!! Every fckn game u can change to your settings that ur pc can handle BUT THIS THING,

is really crap, all setting give same fps!

 

The least thing R* could do is tell us wether they are still workinh on this or that they dont.

 

Tried all tweaks etc there are on this forum, I get the most fps now @ 15 fps average.

[flyer2359]

Its really fokked up.

it is just too cpu hungry, I mean if you can play it on a xbox360 which has a 3200+amd cpu and get 25+fps,

I should could get at least the same speeds with all settings on low and res 800*600.

 

This game is a waste of freakn money, maybe in about 3 years when i upgrade my pc its do-able.

 

 

 

 

 

SERIOUS!!! Every fckn game u can change to your settings that ur pc can handle BUT THIS THING,

is really crap, all setting give same fps!

 

The least thing R* could do is tell us wether they are still workinh on this or that they dont.

 

Tried all tweaks etc there are on this forum, I get the most fps now @ 15 fps average.

actually the xbox 360 has a tri-core processor, so it's not even close to amd 3200+

 

[noVa]

cheers for that , now if i could get the game to not stop working without a reinstall every 3 days i'd be happy.

[TruXter]

GTAiv = Software exceeding hardware.

My only issue is I want better parts to play this game.

just not going to happen though..

 

Gone are the days of game creators making games weak

so they can fit today's hardware. Kinda cool.

Just reality is a bummer when you can't max out the game

on your budget. Couple months we shall see something.

 

Makes me wonder if R* has insight on some ATI/AMD processor about

to plop out.