Not a typical FPS complaint thread

[AGenericGamer]

Alright, I lied. This is a typical FPS complaint thread. My GTA WAS fine, but now it's not playable at all.

No, seriously. Completely unplayable.

When I first started up GTA IV on my PC, I was getting completely ridiculous lag, even on the in-game menu screen. 1.5 FPS on a good day. I solved this issue somehow, and ended up being able to run the game on maximum settings at 25 FPS (This was about a year ago).Problem is, I've now patched my game, everything has been reset, I don't remember how I fixed it last time, so I'm stuck, back in the slums of Lagsville.

I have tried everything. Restart upon restart with different things changed. Things I've tried:

- Reverting to previous patch: Tried. Nope.

- GPU Settings: I've gone to my NVIDIA Control Panel and turned all the settings to lowest for GTA IV.

- GameBooster: Barely noticable difference.

- Graphics/Display settings: I have tried having them on highest, medium and lowest. Nothing.

- Background programs/processes: I know that GameBooster does this but I double checked anyway. Still nothing.

I ran three benchmark tests, first one using high(est) settings, then medium, and finally low(est) and these were my results:

High:

Average FPS: 1.39

Duration: 45.18 sec

CPU Usage: 21%

System memory usage: 58%

Video memory usage: 46%

Graphics Settings

Video Mode: 1280 x 1024 (60 Hz)

Texture Quality: High

Render Quality: High

View Distance: 30

Detail Distance: 50

Medium:

Average FPS: 1.86

Duration: 8.59 sec

CPU Usage: 18%

System memory usage: 54%

Video memory usage: 31%

Graphics Settings

Video Mode: 1280 x 720 (60 Hz)

Texture Quality: Medium

Render Quality: Medium

View Distance: 15

Detail Distance: 20

Low:

Average FPS: 1.82

Duration: 10.46 sec

CPU Usage: 20%

System memory usage: 51%

Video memory usage: 19%

Graphics Settings

Video Mode: 800 x 600 (60 Hz)

Texture Quality: Low

Render Quality: Low

View Distance: 1

Detail Distance: 1

My System Specs are as follows:

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-Bit)

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 430

Video Driver version: 331.65

Audio Adapter: Speakers (VIA High Definition Audio)

AMD Athlon II Quad Core X4 640 Processor (3.00GHz)

RAM: 4GB

As you can see, my system is more than capable of running the game, and it was doing so, perfectly fine, until I patched it. barely ANY difference in FPS between the three. Now, here's the thing. In all of the benchmarks, I can see that the CPU usage never exceeds 21%. Surely that's not right? Isn't GTA IV so poorly optimised it's basically on a high-carb CPU diet? Surely it should be eating up my CPU like nothing else? This leads me to think that my cute little GeForce GT 430 is trying to be a little soldier and handle the processing all by itself, which obviously is a bad idea on such a small card. If that is the case, then could someone please tell me how to make the game use more of the CPU rather than my GPU?

If that isn't the problem, and it's something else completely, then my ears (well, eyes) are open, and I'm willing to listen to whatever you guys/girls(?) think the problem could be.

Any help would be very much appreciated, and I'll be very grateful for your assistance. I know I'm a mug for not remembering what I did last time to fix it, but I've exhausted what I can from Google, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't something blindingly obvious. I really do miss popping old ladies kneecaps while riding a motorbike so getting this fixed is my main priority at the moment.

Thanks in advance,

~ A Generic Gamer

[gear999]

GTA IV has a terrible PC port... that is the only answer I got from the interwebs when I had the same issue. How did I solve it? Easy, I just gave up and bought the game again for console (namely a Xbox 360). And Game Booster? That is a load of bullsh*t that only shuts down small tasks that only take up what? A few KB's of RAM?

[radioman]

Do you have any mods or trainers?

Is this the Downloaded version OR the Retail (DVD) version?

If retail, Is this the Original DVD being used OR a No-DVD crack?

Have you tried doing an un-install, Delete the rest of the install directory that did not get deleted by the traditional un-install, and re-installing to see if that helps?

I'm not too sure about Nvidia drivers, but, IF you have the latest version, try "Rolling back" to an older driver version and see if that helps?-It worked great on GTA III, VC, and SA, so it *might* work with IV?

Have you tried doing a System Restore to the point where the game worked fine?

[AGenericGamer]

Nevermind, all, I fixed it now. Problem was, I reverted to a 1.0.4.0 patch, but still using the GTA.exe file from the 1.0.7.0 version. Caused me problems.

All fixed now, though. Did a fresh install/patch, and now I'm getting even better performance than first of all. 40 FPS on max settings.

Thank you both for your time/replies, though. I appreciate it.