GTA 4 and an SSD

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 3, 2015

I bought a Samsung 850 Evo a week ago on Newegg. It should be here already, but Newegg's shipping sucks now so I'm stuck here pondering whether or not it's gonna turn any tables for Gta4.

I have a Crucial M4, but it has a heavily modded Skyrim and Windows 7 on it, so installing it on there is unpractical. It's also only 128GB.

With vanilla Gta4, I really have no pop-in or slow-loading textures. Everything seems to load within a pretty large radius.

I can install an ENB, some high-res (in comparison to Gta 4's terrible 128x128 textures) textures for most of Liberty City, some weapon replacers, etc, and everything is fine. No pop-in or missing/slow loading textures.

I finally install DKT70's Road textures (which for some reason seem to have been removed because of copyright within the last four hours, bug?? http://www.mediafire...d9gplwu092cue),and I get MASSIVE pop-in, and eventually a full-blown case of slow, unloaded textures. Until the textures finally stop loading, they literally load right in my face, as I drive through them.

Why is this? I still don't know, but it seems in GTA 4's Console-ported glory, a mere WD Caviar Black is not enough to load those small (in the case of Skyrim. I use nearly all 4K textures there without a problem, even if it was on an HDD, which it isn't.) 1K roads in time. Will an SSD, in particular, my incoming 850 Evo, fix this? Will it be fast enough to load the high-res textures quick enough that it should (hopefully) eliminate the pop-in and the slow textures? I've heard about an SSD helping immensely, and moved Skyrim out of my current SSD to test Gta4 on it. However, this didn't work because Steam deleted the Appmanifest, and thus I was never able to actually transfer it over. I now only have reports from other users I have heard, about it helping a tonne, and fixing many texture issues. Is this truthful, does a high-quality, enthusiast SSD like the 850 Evo or similar make a difference when it comes to high-res textures in GTA4?

Unrelated, but I hope I will be able to download the Road textures again. Why??

i7Baby · Jan 3, 2015

The SSD is not going to make the game any better to play. All the SSD will do is shorten the game loading time.

azathoth · Jan 3, 2015

i7Baby :

When the issue with his game is the rate as to which the texture streaming takes place, an SSD's load time will be several fold faster than the rate of a HDD.

So just in the area of texture streaming, there should indeed be at least an improvement.

Have you tried the launch commands "-memrestrict xxxxx -restrictApp 0" to see if they helped any degree?

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 3, 2015

azathoth :

Yep. I've tried them all. No such luck I'm afraid.

I still keep on hearing about how an SSD made (insert name) textures load better and such. Surely the SSD would contribute to loading the textures, not just load time? If so, how big will this improvement be, if predictable in any way? With a performance SSD like the 850 Evo, I would hope it would rid of the problems altogether. It is at least 2x the Read of my WD Caviar Black in which Gta4 is installed (or was - I screwed it up again and need to reinstall).

azathoth · Jan 3, 2015

Sturmgewehr_44 :

azathoth :

Yep. I've tried them all. No such luck I'm afraid.

I still keep on hearing about how an SSD made (insert name) textures load better and such. Surely the SSD would contribute to loading the textures, not just load time? If so, how big will this improvement be, if predictable in any way? With a performance SSD like the 850 Evo, I would hope it would rid of the problems altogether. It is at least 2x the Read of my WD Caviar Black in which Gta4 is installed (or was - I screwed it up again and need to reinstall).

I'm not sure how dependent GTA 4 is on texture streaming, so I can't for sure tell you how much of an improvement there may be. But in games that do heavily use texture streaming (like Rage) there is significant improvement with a SSD vs a HDD.

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 3, 2015

azathoth :

Sturmgewehr_44 :

I'm not sure how dependent GTA 4 is on texture streaming, so I can't for sure tell you how much of an improvement there may be. But in games that do heavily use texture streaming (like Rage) there is significant improvement with a SSD vs a HDD.

I assume it is relatively heavy then because there are a lot of textures that are loaded. I feel like the buildings are, and then the streets. The roads are definitely a problem when replacing them with higher resolution replacements. As I said, they eventually refuse to load and proceed to bug the hell out, until the game either crashes or I quit out of disgust. Do you think this process is pretty dependent on Texture Loading/Streaming?

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 3, 2015

I know that the textures are mostly handled by VRAM. However, in open world games like GTA 4, not all the textures are fully loaded at once, correct? Does this mean that whatever harddrive it is on needs to feed the data to the Ram, and then the VRAM in order to Stream the textures? If the drive is an SSD, and therefore significantly faster, it should cut this process in half?

Am I making any sense?

Obviously there is something regarding GTA 4's buggy engine and textures and an SSD, unless all the "feedback" I read from random websites and Youtube are all lies.

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 3, 2015

i7Baby :

Yeah, I kind of figured that out. I still hope something will happen though. How could it alledgedly work for others then? I understand an SSD really has no role in this case, but I'm hoping that with GTA 4, an awful port and unstable as it gets, that anything could happen. What about Texture Streaming? Does an SSD have a part in that? If an SSD couldn't do anything, what could? More Ram? I've already got 16 GB. Rockstar and their bloody demands...

Scar89 · Jan 3, 2015

With a rig like that, I would put it down to the game engine itself not using your hardware to its potential.

Sturmgewehr_44 · Jan 7, 2015

I just installed GTA 4, along with the Liberty City Textures and the ENB, to my new SSD.

I also managed to install most of DKT70's road textures, but not all, since they have been mostly taken off of most sites in the past week. The only ones I was able to get were the ones I backed up - most of them save for the generic main road texture.

Pop-in seems reduced with the SSD, but still very much exists. It's also possible the SSD isn't responsible for this, and maybe the lack of the high-res main road texture could have made this happen.

I no longer get the missing textures problem when crossing the Algonquin bridge to Alderney, where before, it triggered it almost every time in 1-2 runs across it.

However, after cruising around downtown Alderney and Alderney City, after visiting Bohan, the textures stopped loading yet again. However, they actually managed to semi-recover themselves, where they never did before.

I put noprecache and ReservedApp into my commandline and I haven't had any of this since. I tested again after this for around 45 minutes, just driving and walking around, and I went in a helicopter near the end. So far, no slow-loaded or bugged textures. There is flickering, particularly on the green Alderney docks building, but I believe this issue also existed in the vanilla game.

Does it seem like my SSD is helping at all in this situation??

I want to get that main road texture to see how it fairs then. That texture was likely the biggest contributor to the textures not loading properly. If this isn't a drive issue, than what is it? Could it be caching related?

Edit: It eventually did it again. I give up. I've spent 100 hours trying to get a fix, maybe even more. GTA 5 is out on PC in two weeks, so it's a good time to forget about all this.

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GTA 4 and an SSD

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