I created a topic similar to this (located here ) a while back to gauge my system (see signature) to what others experienced.

I love my high performance computer as well as car mods so I am willing to live with 30 minutes of game play on LCPDFR. That being said, I think a lot of it is that our machines are too advanced for the poor PC port of GTA-IV. The mods (high poly cars, LCPDFR, and others) do have something to do with it as well, meaning that it will inevitably crash because it's running things it wasn't designed to do.

get an SSD and have your game on that, so when it crashes it crashes fast and your back up and playing in under 1 min. (I love my SSD!)

wasnt GTA 4 originally designed to run on 8 cores? I remember reading it was for some crazy amount

my current set up is amazing, 650 bucks for everything but a case and I love it! I5-2400, with 6870, 8gb ram, and SSD, I will never go back to a conventional harddrive for my OS/games.

2600K is the i7, I was -gonna- get it, but the only major differences were the HT in the long run, which, while nice, wasn't worth the $100 at the time I felt :P

And yes, more so when we'd have to continously tell people they had to basically gimp the game because the comp was too 'modern' for it, lol. Some games have started going with 64-bit versions too, just not many.

@stormoffires

I have a Intel SSD on my New Egg watch list, just holding my cards for the right time to strike

@Synapt

I love my 2600K i7, the only thing I need to do is increase my cooling (and the SSD). I do not feel comfortable OCing it yet without better cooling. But honestly, I haven't needed to OC it for what games I play, which is not very many.

Chad: Get a Zalman, pretty much -any- Zalman cooler with the tube+fin design will dissipiate heat like crazy.

My zalman 120mm on my E8400 had it running between 3.6GHz-4GHz and never going over 50C usually.

On this I have a zalman 132mm cooler on top of my 2500K, and it peaks out about 40-45C per core at max so far (though in the summer that will probably go up a bit as we get really humid summers here).

Perhaps the architecture of the (formerly) newest i5 lineup isn't being taken advantage of. Some components have different priorities as time goes on depending on software of the day. I remember playing a game called Deus Ex (the original one, not Human Revolution) and for multiplayer servers, in later years we found out that the game calls for older CPU instructions like MMX, 3DNOW, etc and actually performs worse with a Core 2 Duo or Quad than a single core Pentium IV or sometimes even a Pentium III. I'm sure other things like drivers factor into it too, but when people first complained about GTA IV's performance on PC, the developers said that the highest graphics settings were intended for "future hardware", which is more or less a cover for them doing a horrible job porting over a less than Crysis-like game engine and having it perform worse than said game on medium settings. Quite frankly I don't know if GTA IV will ever work "properly" on any hardware config. The processor and GPU can definitely bottleneck each other, although I don't know for certain if that's whats happening here.

The bottom line here is that your hardware is good, but GTA IV hasn't reached the bottom of its barrel yet while scraping around for more PC hardware to gobble up.

Edited April 27, 201213 yr by unr3al

I had the Athlon II X2, as well as an ATI Radeon HD2600 pro, 2GB RAM and running XP I managed to get 20FPS on average on low/medium settings, but had no spare cash to build a decent PC.

I built a new PC at Christmas when I had a bit of cash, with a AMD Phenom II X4 960T Black edition, unlocked to 6 cores, as well as the MSI GTX 560 Ti, which is overclocked slightly. And 8GB Corsair vengeance RAM and Windows 7 64-Bit..

I now get 45 FPS average on all high settings... I was very happy :)

@tom, when i was waying out which processor to get, I heavly looked at that 6 core one, since i do alot of 3D modeling with Maya and what not, but idk what AMD did with their cores, but the 6core and even the 8core they got just are not cutting it for main line gaming, great for processing and being work horses. I think it probably has to do with what unr3al was getting at with the way games are designed. Also AMD sayed they are going to a whole new chipset so the MB for AM3+ will be out of date and would require a new board :(

I was impressed with Intel at their I5 quad core processors, cause i had an old pentium back in the day and it was a champ, then some AMD cores but never impressed with them. This quad core is rocking 50-60fps in GTA on all settings high, and without anything over clocked maya and other programs run smooth as a babys butt. I had a good laugh tho when i took a large sphere in maya and just exploded it into all its little polygon frags, and my computer shit a break but for 600 bucks, cant go wrong.

Hmmm.... don't really use Intel tbh, always chosen AMD. No real reason why, it's just what I've always chosen. I may look into building another rig with a intel processor when I get some cash together. Money's a bit tight at the moment and other things kind of take priority :)

Old rig- OEM - with upgrades

Intel E8400 @ 3GHZ

4GB ram @ 800mhz

5670 1GB

G33m02 board

new rig

AMD Fx-8150 @ 4.2 Overclocked with h100 cooler. CPU usage during game is about 40-60%

Asus crosshair V

8GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600mhz

AMD 6950 2GB

haf 932

but idk what AMD did with their cores, but the 6core and even the 8core they got just are not cutting it for main line gaming, great for processing and being work horses. I think it probably has to do with what unr3al was getting at with the way games are designed

AMD said in a press statement a few months ago that they don't consider themselves competitive with Intel anymore and that it's not their main target. Currently AMD's focus is shifted towards getting an actual graphics card on the CPU die (a noble idea which will be good for tablets and phones, but AMD won't be ready for those devices for at least another year or two which is faaaaaaaarrrrrrrr too late to enter the mobile business), rather than directly battling Intel for supremacy. AMD hasn't had CPU supremacy since the early 2000's, and never had it at all before that. I think a lot of people are disappointed with the Bulldozer CPUs because they had high expectations that they were a response to the Core i7's, and they just weren't. The old Phenom II chips even beat them in some benchmark tests. AMD is taking a different design approach which they are attempting to go for a real APU while at the same time trying to squeeze in as many cores as possible so they don't have to have completely different production runs for business CPUs and home CPUs, that way they can cut production costs. (Note that their first 6 core CPU was 'Istanbul', a server processor, the new 6 core home CPUs didn't see the light of day for months and months after.) Unfortunately, neither of these two things translate to any sort of real benefit in a video game, or a modern day CAD program. Intel Core i7 CPUS have always kicked the hell out of AMD's in business applications, but the Phenoms were competitive in gaming, for less money. So AMD had the value card to play. Now that Intels have surpassed AMD chips in gaming, and AMD more or less refused to answer back with a competitive architecture, there is no more argument. AMD is not a competitive gaming CPU choice any longer.

This statement by the way, is coming from someone who had an Athlon XP 2800+ based PC in 2003, and is currently typing this message on an Phenom II X4 955BE machine that I built in 2009. I had AMD chips at those points because they were the best for the money. There is no AMD processor I'd rather pick than an Intel for a laptop or desktop as of this writing. And to be honest I don't think Steamroller (the successor to Bulldozer) is going to cut it either. They need another re-design. And since AMD separated themselves from Global Foundries (their former chip manufacturing plant) and don't have anywhere near the amount of money needed to design an entirely new chip and then send it into mass production, it's not going to happen any time in the near future. Let's also not forget that AMD has nVidia to worry about, who they are also now losing to on the graphics battlefield. At least on the graphics end of things AMD is keeping pace. But they're struggling, and one big misstep will be all it takes to topple AMD over for good.

Edited April 29, 201213 yr by unr3al

Unr3al: The original Deus Ex games played pretty well on my Core 2 box, though I basically modded mine up as well.

As for AMD, AMD basically has been playing catch up with Intel on 90% of their chips ever since the original Core 2 arch came out from Intel, that was a major boost in their performance and gaming (where as for years before, AMD basically led the way in game performance). Ever since then only a few decent AMD gaming chips came out that were better and/or more affordable for what they gave.

AMD's true crash finally came when they overhyped the bulldozer cores, it came out and the only thing people could think was "You guys serious?", after that they pretty much anounced they're phasing out entirely desktop CPU's and going to focus on mobile devices and server processors indeed.

As for anyone looking to upgrade, the new Ivy Bridge chips are out, and roughly the same price as the Sandy Bridge chips, go for them if you can, even at the same price they're notably higher performance and even less power thanks to the new core size.

Edit:

On a side of bad news, my 16 gigs of memory is bad, shoulda memtested it sooner.

On a side of good news, by the end of the week probably, my 16 gigs will now be 32 gigs, lol.

Edited May 1, 201213 yr by Synapt

Late bit of an update but I feel I should make one.

I still cant' figure out why core affinity 'fixed' the performance issues to an extent, I think I finally figured out what it all was in general.

As noted before, my first sticks of RAM were bad, so those are replaced now and good to go, then I found out roughly a week~ ago my poor 460GTX did apparently get bugged out when I moved it into this system, as I decided to do some bench marks on it and found it had insane artifacts being logged (eg; 10 second fuzzy test and I had 40k artifacts detected, lol). So that's out and a new 560 is in, so far so good, don't need to mess with core affinities anymore o.O

Oh technology, how a pain you can be sometimes :|