Grand Theft Auto 4 bottleneck?

[Diggyputz]

Hi everyone at Tom's

I have a slight issue

When I run GTA4, no matter what setting or configuration, it lags like a beyotch.
I get 50 fps standing still, but when I start to move, it drops to 2 then levels out at 10-15

Now with this same setup I can run Battlefield 3 on low settings, 1080p at ~30fps...

What gives?

I heard that GTA4 is heavy on CPU power, but wouldn't BF3 be heavy also?


Thanks for any help

CPU--AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0GHz
MOBO--ASUS M3A78
RAM--4GB DDR2 800MHz
GPU--ASUS GTX 550Ti DCU
PSU--Raidmax 530W
Windows 7 Ultimate

 

[gunner87]

Have you just started playing GTA 4? GTA 4 was poorly ported to PC when it came to PC and almost everyone had this lagging and fps issue.
BTW, have you patched the game yet? I believe patch 1.4 and/or 1.5 can solve your problem, it did for me.

 

[ElMoIsEviL]

Given the CPU in use (Athlon 64 X2) I can't say I'm surprised. GTA IV, as the poster above indicated, has been so badly ported over from console that it eats up CPU cycles.

It also eats up VRAM. Is that a 1GB Framebuffer on that GTX 550 Ti DCU?

 

[Diggyputz]

Gunner, I bought it on Steam, and I'm pretty damn sure that it's patched to 1.7, but I'm not too sure how to check

Elmo the card has 1GB of VRAM yes

 

[giovanni86]

I just had a question, if the game is soo poorly ported to the PC and eats up resources like crazy why are there these amazing realism mods out there that run like butter. Oh thats right takes a real PC to run them got ya =P

 

[Lee-m]

I used to play GTA IV on the same cpu (and a 9800gtx) It was totally unplayable for months until they released a few patches, and then it was okish at medium detail after that.

Its an atrocious port of a game that was designed for 3 cores, and is the embodiment of everything thats wrong with pc gaming right now.