So I was having this issue of super bad lag and it made me not even want to play. I looked at tons of posts from this site and many others and after trying many different suggestions and spending hours and hours I still couldnt get the lag to stop. he lag was so bad I got so mad and threw one of my monitors across my office. So after buying a new monitor I talked to a friend who said that GTA IV was poorly codded for the PC version and that the game did not like running on a multi-core processor.

 

So here is what he suggested, and I tell ya what, it actually worked and the games runs so much better. Go into your task manager and under processes find GTA IV and right click, then click 'Set Affinity' and choose only one core for it to run off of. I guarantee your FPS will go way up. Next start out with all the graphic setting on low, turn off shadows because its a major FPS killer, View Distance @ 25, Detail Distance @ 25, Vehicle Density @ 20 and Vsync off. Start from there and slowly increase the graphics until the game looks good and still functions good.

 

Before I did this I was getting around 9-11 FPS, now I get 23-24 FPS.

 

My system is as follows just in case your wondering...

 

Dell Optiplex 990

I5 3.30 GHz

8 GB DDR3 Ram

2 ATI Radeon HD 5450s in Crossfire

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

GTA IV EFLC (Disc Version, strangely its in English and French, but thats what you get when you order it from Amazon for $5)

 

Hopefully this will help someone.

Most of these fixes are already known, but it's good that more people find out about them. Setting affinity for a process in generally not recommended since Windows basically is a cluster of processes. Changing the priority of some processes may cause other unwanted issues. Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. There are very few good reasons to change the affinity of a thread. It's better to use the software called "Large Adress Aware" and applying it to GTA IV.exe and LaunchGTAIV.exe. Using the 'commandline.txt" file is also a good thing to do. There you can force the game to use all available resources, or lower the setttings even more.

Edited September 17, 201312 yr by ineseri

MODERATOR NOTICE
Topic belongs to GTA IV Discussion, moving,