What is your graphics settings? I have a beast PC but can only play all on Medium setting or else I get camera lag. :\

Ive got a good computer too, and i can only run at high, not maximum... and even then sometimes i get a little lag when lots of custom cars get loaded... GTA4 uses LOTS of CPU, you have to have a good CPU to get anywhere.

I went from this set up...

dual core amd (2.0ghz or something), 4gb ram, nvidia 9800 GTX+ graphics

Ran on MINIMUM settings, Barely...

To this one.

top of the range I5, 4gb ram, nvidia 9800 GTX+

Ran on medium / high perfectly fine

Then i just put more ram in it (now 8gb), and im running on high settings without problems... I just cant put everything to high for some reason, it thinks that cuz i have a 512mb card it wont load anything else... Even though its perfectly capable of passing regular ram through the cpu over to the graphics card without problems (if it needed to), idk. haha...

But overall....

This game was designed and coded for a gaming system. Lots of processors with nice caches on them. They have super fast access to the cache, and use that instead of ram - its a different set up than a PC. Its basically a massive graphics card that can be used for processing (a computer is the other way around, its a processing machine that is capable of producing graphics)

When they re coded it for PC they were lazy... They never did it properly, they just made it so it would 'run' on a pc. Of course, a PC uses the resources it has much differently than a game system - but it didnt matter, it ran and they were happy... CPU usage is through the roof with this game. It pages stuff in and out of memory way too often, etc. etc... Those things are acceptable in a PS3 or something, because thats exactly what they were designed for... Computers are not designed for that.

Whats worse, is that if its done properly a computer is an amazing gaming machine. In some instances better than a PS3, but if the game engine is not designed for a computer, its not going to run correctly. It WILL run slower, and it will use resources that it shouldn't need to.

Hopefully those issues will be fixed with gta5

Corsair Vengeance 3 x 4 GB (3 because of my chipset likes it more.)

Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200

ASUS Rampage III Extreme Republic of Gamers

Core i7 I7-930 @ 4 GHz

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD

Samsung SpinPoint F3 Desktop Class HD103SJ

1 TB x3

Thermaltake Level 10 GT

OCZ Agility 3 Series Solid State Disk 240 GB x2 in RAID

Gigabyte GV N580 @ 1100 MHz

I run everything at very high with iCE enhancer and 4x AA

Dunno why the style is that way, or why there's links. You'll have to deal with it, cba to fix.

Edited December 23, 201114 yr by Jacob

Same ROG board and cpu as jacob here.

But I run my CPU at 3Ghz and have x3 2 Gig ram

Also different GFX card.

I run most things on max Except I dont bother having water on high its at med. And night shaddows I sometimes have on sometimes not. Don't seem to matter if they are on MAX or Med performance wise.

The game also says I have run out of Vram if I have night shaddows on and water at MAX but I aint bothered about water tbh.

As for ENB I have a Several different game folders one with ENB and tbh It looks nice, but I prefer to get another 20 FPS and play it without 90% of the time. (personal choice)

My FPS hover around 50fps but now and then I still get a small stutter at times but I put that down to my GFX card don't really like playing at the low res I am forced to play at due to the restriction of my crap monitor : 1280 x 1024 :p (Was due to upgrade it after I buit the pc last summer but ran out of cash :(

In hindsight wish I had brought x3 4Gig of ram as Jacob did but I'm happy. tbh I don't think GTA IV will ever run as well as it should. It's just not made as well as it could of been no matter what rig you have.

Edited December 23, 201114 yr by Molten

You guys have some beast computers, I can't wait to upgrade my system like that, but I see my system as a medium PC.

So here's some of the tweaks and settings that did it for me...

FIRST

The main thing you have to play around with is the commandline:

I have mine set like this

-noprecache

-availablevidmem 2.2

-forcehighqualitymirrors

-norestrictions

-nomemrestrict

or if you want more http://www.gamespot....ptions-46867982

SECOND

Download this

CFF explorer:

http://www.ntcore.com/exsuite.php

Right click on LaunchGTAIV

Open with CFF explorer

Go down to File Header and click on it

Find characteristics and in that same row find click here and click on it.

go down to to "App can handle>2gb address space" and make sure to check it and then OK

Click on File and save (don't save it as), then it's going to tell you " Overwrite original file?" so click on No, save it somewhere else like desktop or anywhere other than the GTA IV folder.

Now go to where you save it and drag to you Grand Theft Auto IV folder and that's all.

This will allow GTA IV to use more than 2gb of memory.

The guy with i7 930, you could buy a water or air cooling system for your CPU, but I would advice you to get the corsair h100 or the Noctua NH-D14, I just bought the H100 and GTA IV is sweet at 30 to 40FPS even if I am recording with Fraps.

Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfkRmS710e8

or if your overclock is not stable enough let the Intel

The guy with i7 930, you could buy a water or air cooling system for your CPU,

Yeah I use corsair H70 and been in use now for about 7 months no problems.

Only thing I did different was to instal it so its not using hot air inside the case to cool the radiator. I draw air from the outside of the case.

Edited December 23, 201114 yr by Molten

To touch on a system config I read about earlier in this thread;

A Core i5 is a pretty good gaming processor on a budget, but it's still not an i7, and the 9800GTX is a very old card. It's a slightly better version of the 8800GTX which was the first video card ever able to run DX10.

I myself have a Phenom II X4 955 BE and a GTX 570 (third most powerful single GPU card you can get, now that the 7970 is out) and maximizing it is still not an option, especially for steady frame rates. In any case, GTA IV is a crappy console port that had very little effort put into it for optimization. One more generation of hardware should be enough to finally subdue it with a reasonable budget, but after all these years, it still strikes me as ridiculous. Hopefully the PC version of GTA V won't be as bad.

Currently running the following settings:-

Resolution: 1980 x 1080 (60Hz)

Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Texture Quality: High

Reflection Resolution: Very High

Water Quality: Very High

Shadow Quality: High

Night Shadows: High

Texture Filter: x16

View Distance: 70

Details Distance: 100

Vehicle Density: 100

Definition: On

VSync: Off

This runs without lag and at 30fps on the following system:-

AMD Phenom

I don't consider 30fps playable. That's why I don't crank everything.

I don't consider 30fps playable. That's why I don't crank everything.

I am happy when I get ~20fps in a game on my computer, GTA IV averages 8-16fps for me!

I don't consider 30fps playable. That's why I don't crank everything.

With the shadows on very high i was getting 20fps and with ELS running you certianly noticed the lights changing almost in a slow montion lol

Turned shadows down to high and now getting 30fps with els light patterns looking as they should and the game run smooth. Its certianly more than playable.

I take it you like 60fps or higher? Can i ask what settings you currently have?