Shadow problem

Have you installed the latest ATI drivers? That would be the first step.

im useing ati catalyst 10.8 is thier another ati driver???

Well, 10.9 is the latest. I do know 10.8 gave me problems with Borderlands where Borderlands would crash after about 5 minutes of play.

You might try 10.9 to see.

Also, have you patched GTA IV to the latest patches? Do that as well. The latest patch for GTA IV really helped cure some performance problems plus it gives you finer control over the detail settings.

Also, in GTA IV, what is your view distance set to? Anything above 30-35 is overkill and not worth it. Setting it to 35 will still surpass the consoles in regards to the view distance.

ive updated gta iv to latest patch and emm my distance is 32

but the poblem isnt about gta iv only its assassins creed too

and crysis aswel i was on 10.7 and now 10.8 and i will update to 10.9 once i get home and i will see hope it helpes me


thanks for youre help  

i did update to 10.9 didnt help at all seems like a cpu problem??

Borderlands crashed on me after a few minutes using CCC 10.4/.6
I think Borderlands crashing wasn't the drivers fault but the actual game itself.

Overall, that resolution is small so you should be getting great fps even on the higher settings within games. What is your cpu at though, the 630 is 2.8GHz right?

The drivers were a problem with Borderlands. Updating to 10.9 fixes the problem. It's even listed in the driver docs as a fix.

thats my cpu and yes its 2.8 ghz

is it the problem?
cuz i thought about upgrading to phenom ii x4 965 but they said it wouldnt make much diffrence

It still could be an issue with your CPU. The athlon's are not as good as the phenom's when it comes to gaming due to the extra cache that is on the Phenoms.

My current Phenom is also a 2.8ghz cpu. Whether or not I overclock it, I can still get around 40 fps on GTA IV with some pretty good settings.

I would say upgrading to the Phenom you listed should help in many respects. But, GTA IV will STILL crawl at times just because of how it was ported. I'm still surprised that the 5770 didn't help though. Strange.

My Athlon was able to unlock it's fourth core, overclock to 3.6GHz, and runs great in my opinion.
I just don't know how AthlonIIx3's compare in overclocking to a quad version.

I was under the impression that the Phenom's extra L3 cache would help, but this article from Tom's Hardware shows that it's not always the case.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-l3-cache,241...

So, in your case, you might be just fine. They saw with the lower speed Athlons and Phenoms, there's not much difference. But when you get to the higher speed chips, the scaling between the two makes the Phenom the better choice.

Athlon II's also match Intel's quad cores.
Tricore and quads match them in video rendering and editing, although they lose slightly in gaming performance.

so u guys think its a cpu problem? could a cpu cause a shadow problem isnt the gpu whats doin that??

hmmm ? i bought borderlands yesterday

and when i put shadow on i get 40 fps and when its off i get 60 with vsync so its really a problem its droping a 20 fps i really havent seen that befor

a 20 fps drop for the shadow


well the place where i bought my pc at told me that its either the motherboard's or the cpu's driver thats causing this shadow fps drop


does that really make any sense or a hint????


(thanks for helping me)

Shadows is a detail that WILL decrease frame rates. There's nothing you can do about that. With it dropping 20 fps, I'm not sure. Usually you can also determine how detailed your shadows are.

Again, have you updated to the latest video drivers for your card?

In the case of GTA IV, turning on shadows will definitely affect it especially in the city. Consider all the buildings, people, cars that are there, especially the buildings and dropping that much at medium to high is not that abnormal.

Have you considered overclocking your video card and possibly your CPU? When I overclocked my 5750, I gained about 5 to 7 fps. My CPU OC gained me another 5 fps I believe.