GTA4 issues

Funny enough mate i have had similar problems with my area 51 alx which is running i7-990x and 2 gtx580s and i get lag at points of the game and also ive had the system shut down all together and restart instantly, dell have told me its a power issue and are sending out a new psu but im in the same boat as you mat i paid $7000 for this and its been trouble since day one

This isn't just lag at points during the game, it's laggy the whole time.. Even on the lowest graphic settings it lags to the point of being unplayable, despite the in-game memory usage showing it to be well inside the minimum.. The benchmark results using the in-game are also horrific..

I'm running at ATI Radeon HD 5730, so there wouldn't be SLI, correct? Here is the memory allotment:

Total Available Graphics Memory: 3831 MB.

Dedicated Video Memory: 1024 MB.

System Video Memory: 0 MB (bad?)

Shared System Memory: 2807 MB..

I'm not a much of a computer geek so this doesn't mean much to me..

Try turning off SLI and just play on one 580 ... It should play fine. If it uses PhysX, dedicated the other card to that.

That comment was for Dazman's desktop.

For you ... gaming on a laptop? I suggest you learn about your system ... and then check the drivers and cooling.  Check for latest version of game (patch level).

No, no SLI. A desktop 5730 with 1024mb dedicated memory should run it ok, not sure about the laptop version 5730. Maybe try turning down your in-game settings and resolution.

Be sure the laptop is plugged-in and set to "High Performance".

Tesla's referring to your Power Settings, by the way - my greedy SLI laptop needs High Performance power settings on all the time.

Other thoughts:  be sure GTA IV is patched all the way up.  Also, start with the obvious performance hits:  disable (or dial down) Antialiasing.  Try running in a slightly lower resolution if your screen is 1920 x 1080.  Try dialing back shadows.

It's been a while since I've owned an ATI card, but I know that nVidia's control panel will let you set individual per-game settings that cover some things the game may not.  If you can do this in the ATI software, try also looking over settings like that.  One thing nVidia gives me is, as suggested above, the ability to choose where PhysX goes.  For Mirror's Edge on my laptop I disabled it completely (dual 8700Ms).  But then on my desktop I tell it to use the GPU.  If you can change it to "use CPU", try that too.

So, to sum up...

1) be sure power settings are at high performance and you're plugged in

2) try disabling SLI

3) try disabling or dialing down AA

4) try disabling or dialing down shadows

For a game like GTA IV, you might also consider lowering the draw distance--that city is so tight that you probably don't need to see a long way away most of the time like you would in a game with a lot of wide, open areas.

I've tried all of those things.. Even on the lowest possible settings is doesn't play properly.. Plugged in, on High Performance mode..

Am I crazy to expect a self-branded 'Gaming Laptop' to play a game that is 18-months older than the computer, straight out of the box.. Is that an unfair expectation?

Surely if you bought a toaster, and even on the highest setting it barely cooked the toast you'd take it back right? It doesn't do what it was advertised to do?

1. Try updating the game

2. Do you have enbseries mod, sometimes that will screw things up a bit

turn off the "clip capture" option in the game and the restart the game and try from there. I was having this problem and after i turned clip capture off it works like i champ

Hey Kieran13:

To address your question, "Am I crazy to expect a self-branded 'Gaming Laptop' to play a game that is 18-months older than the computer, straight out of the box.. Is that an unfair expectation? "

No, you're not crazy at all to expect that.  However, what can sometimes happen is that the way code is written doesn't always line up nicely with the way software and hardware drivers are written.  It's one of the reasons Microsoft came up with the DirectX specification:  game developers had to write tons more code to talk directly to the hardware and now they have a layer that abstracts those calls, with an API to translate to whatever hardware the user plugs into their machine.

So your problems remind me of Halo for the PC.  I got a blazing machine with Windows Vista on it, and thought Halo would look magnificent.  Instead, I got single-digit framerates and the occasional freeze-up.  It boiled down to the way the code was written.

If it helps, GTA IV played very well for me on a 5-year-old machine that had an AMD Athlon 4400+ with dual 8800GTS in SLI with many options high (but not max).  On my Area-51 ALX, it runs great at full settings.

My point being that it may simply be this particular title, your particular hardware, and as the folks who posted after me suggest, it may also be remedied with a simple workaround like disabling a mod or turning off clip-capture.

If you try these things, please post back here so that anyone else who runs into this problem knows whether this solves it.  And of course good luck to you.

Okay, I re-installed GTA IV and looked to see if I could spot any Win7-specific issues on my desktop.  Keep in mind my hardware configuration (desktop) is going to be very different from yours.

Thus far, I haven't seen any unexplained performance drops like I saw with the Halo PC issue.  I have however uncovered these things:

1) you want to be sure it's got the latest updates.  The patch notes for the last fix (which was aimed at Liberty City Stories) specifically addressed performance issues related to water.  For me, that meant being sure I had the Rockstar Social Club account logged in and Games for Windows Live logged in, and both updated (ptui, ptui, bad taste of intrusive DRM, blah!).

2) The biggest performance killers I've noticed for games in general is water and trees.  If you find these drops are happening more when there's a lot of open water on the screen, or you're driving through a park, then that may be it and you want to try to dial down the detail on these elements (for example, "reflections" on water means a lot more performance issues than when it's just being mapped across people/objects).  I saw a slight frame drop driving along the beach with water on one side, the city's details on the other.

I realize you mentioned this being 'laggy all over' - I take it the benchmark doesn't point out any one element in the report that's worse than all the rest?

Hope that helps:  I'd expected to find some other culprit, but that's really all I've got for now. :-/

I could run GTA IV alright on my desktop, but Episodes from Liberty City or whatever (the "expansion") would always run like garbage and cause a BSOD within 5-10 minutes. I read about others having similar issues, both with Episodes and vanilla GTA IV. It's just really poorly optimized for the PC, so don't feel too bad if you can't get it working - it's probably the game, not your laptop. Unfortunately PCs aren't like consoles, there's no guarantee you can run every game out there acceptably no matter what your specs are.