I posted this on the GTA forums, but figured i'ld post it here too since you guys have helped me more then once and i know this place to be more reliable then a lot of other forums :P

Anyways, here's my post on the GTA forums.



Just picked up GTAIV, $15 didn't seem like a bad deal, but with the kind of performance i'm getting...i'm beginning to think that i just wasted $15.

Anyways, hopefully someone here can help.

First of all, here are my specs:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (64 Bit).
RAM: 2GBs.
Processor: AMD Dual Core 3800+.
Graphics Card: ATI 3870 (512MBs VRAM).

I booted up GTAIV (after patching and having to run around the internet for a while before finding out that i had to update Live manually...) and tweaked the settings a little bit, i got a little frustrated with the resource meter, but in the end figured it would be a very good way to easily adjust the game to maximize performance and graphics quality without a dozen reboots and a hundred visits to the options menu. Game starts, i watch the intro and notice a little bit of lag and/or stuttering which i easily dismiss as the game needing some "fine tuning" on the options menu. Once i get control of the game, it runs as if it were submerged in molasses. No amount of tweaking in the graphics options improves performance enough to make the game playable.

Once in Roman's apartment, performance somewhat improves by about 75%, it still skips now and again, but it's very much playable, but when i step outside, i lose all performance i had gained just a moment ago. I did the memrestrict thing and performance improved, but only slightly.

As mentioned before, tweaking the graphical settings do little which i find wierd as there should be SOME graphical improvement if i lower everything from Very High and High to Medium.

I've also come accross a few topics suggesting several fixes, including one specific for ATI Graphics Card players, but i'm not sure, hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

Hopefully i included everything

Thanks!

Edit:
Forgot to mention, i'm also getting slow loading textures and pop ups (stuff that are randomly rendered in the game or that appear invisible until the textures load up) even when the game is running OK.

I also took the steps mentioned in this thread http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=481333 they seem to have somewhat helped, game is more "playable" now, except for the aforementioned missing textures and pop ups.

That's GTA4. It always has mediocre performance.

This is the correct answer. No seriously. This is the correct answer.

o.O

2 gigs? Really?

I can't help much on how to make the game run better, but poor performance is a more than well known issue on pretty much any rockstar games on PC, with GTA IV taking the cake.

Sorry to seem rude but your PC just isn't up to running GTA IV in any reasonable way.

Invest in a GTX 570 and throw another couple of GB of RAM in there and you might start to see some improvement.

The reason your game's running sluggish is probably due to the cpu bottlenecking the gfx card. The 2 gigs of RAM don't help, from what I remember reading when the game came out, 4gigs was recommended.

Thats a little disappointing considering i can run Resident Evil 5 on max settings and at 1680 x 1050 on that same rig.

GTA IV is a poorly optimized port. Hell it wasn't even working for like a week when they released it.
So yeah what you are experiencing is normal.

As others have said, I'd definitely suggest improving your RAM. Windows 7 alone takes 1 Gig to run, you should definitely get at least 2 more Gb of RAM.

With the 64 bit version of Windows 7, I think there is little to no benefit to having more than 6 Gb RAM, however, so don't buy too much if you decide to upgrade.

I'm waiting to build myself a new system since i have to upgrade the entire computer literally if i want to get in more then 4GBs of RAM and a better processor....so yeah...minimum/recommended specs on the box sure were misleading O.O

^This

I have a +4400 CPU, 2GB of RAM, SLI'd 460GTX's and it runs fine at 1280x1024

Windows 7 doesn't need 1GB for itself as such; what happens is that it gobbles up spare memory to speed up prefetching and whatnot but will give it back whenever programs need it. On my 2GB system Windows 7 64-bit averages about 512MB, and that scales down even further during demanding tasks like gaming. If you have 4GB or more you'll rarely be using enough to make it drop this low so in Task Manager it appears that the OS is constantly greedy.

Sorry but GTA4 sucks ass on PC's its a shoddy port with no optimization that runs like crap i'd still up your ram to 4GB your on the base level for a 64bit os