CPU Usage

[unwinding]

It's nice to know that there are finally some mid-to-high PCs that can max the game out and run 60+ FPS. But I don't plan on upgrading any time soon and I'm not going to hold my breath for any further performance patches (at least official ones).

 

We all know that GTA IV is CPU-bound more than anything (better GPUs will still help though). Recently, I accidentally launched the game and impatiently went to forcefully close it from the task manager when I noticed that it was using 99% of my CPU. Doing nothing. Just sitting at the title screen, not loading anything in to memory. Just basically idle. Why? Is it somehow 'reserving' clock cycles? Is that even a possibility (I'm thinking no)? And most importantly, is it even necessary?

 

I'm using an 'antique' Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz processor coupled with a geforce 9800 GT with 1GB vram (In Windows 7 with 4 gigs of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive). Even using the settings for the console version posted in the faq, it struggles to maintain 30fps. If I turn it to 800x600 and everything to low, the benchmark tells me 45 fps. So I did an experiment with my wife's PC which has the same processor but a low end video card with 1/4 the vram of mine. Same settings, but averaged at 21fps which really isn't that big a difference. 800x600 everything on low, 45 fps same as mine. So no surprises, the game is CPU is obviously the bottleneck even though I have a much better video card.

 

Obviously this proves nothing we already didn't know and can be fixed with a quad core. My buddy plays the game with a core 2 quad (not an i5 or i7) and gets a better framerate (but still not 60fps on his setup, not sure the video card). His task manager said the game was using around 67% of the CPU and maxes out 3/4 cores. This makes sense because the 360 was the lead platform for development and it has a triple core processor. Each core of the xenon is multi-threaded too so it can run 6 threads, although I'm not sure it was designed for that many threads cause people with dual core i5/i7 have 4 threads because of hyper threading and still have performance issues (possibly because turboburst shuts off a core under heavy load? I don't know how it works...). And the PS3's cell has a bunch of cores so it probably wasn't difficult porting it over to that.

 

Anyways, GTA IV likes three cores it seems. And it likes to max out each core even at the title screen. But why? The graphics aren't special.. they're not bad but they are nothing special. I know it's been said the reasoning is the game is calculating where every object is in liberty city and the physics, etc. But I don't buy that as an excuse to max out the CPU, other physics engines don't behave that way.

 

So if GTA IV is using up three cores if you got 'em at all times, is there a way to mod it so that it doesn't? Because it seems quite unnecessary and inefficient. I realize my setup is old by now, but so is the game and I can still run most new games on high settings with my 'antiquated' setup.