Frankly I’m not sure it’s worth even attempting to put up with this crap. There are so many brilliant games out right now…
I woke up this morning, saw that GTA 4 is still downloading from Steam (I don’t have high bandwidth). I was surprised at the amount of threads in forums about the performance issue. Yesterday I was cock sure that it wouldn’t affect me as I own a Core 2 Quad, 2GB and nvidia 9800GTX but now I am not so sure anymore. I hope it runs fine. I blew my lunch money on this and it better be good because I don’t have a box, manual or CD to chew on when I am hungry!
I like how they list out every available XInput/360 compatible gamepad instead of just saying “XInput compatible gamepad required” or “Yeah, it only works with 360 controllers. Suck it!”
I’m happy to report that after an install that took nearly 90 minutes the game runs fine on my rig. I played about 30 minutes and ran a bench mark and had no issues at all. Well, out side of the game crashing if you log into the social club but thats optional anyways.
Here is my bench mark results:
Statistics
Average FPS: 42.98
Duration: 37.18 sec
CPU Usage: 92%
System memory usage: 77%
Video memory usage: 92%
Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: Medium
Render Quality: High
View Distance: 25
Detail Distance: 37
Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Ultimate
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Video Driver version: 178.13
Audio Adapter: Speakers (High Definition Audio Device)
Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
This is a huge disappointment, I have a high-end system and I’m skipping on the game because I’m worried about performance.
I’m on Vista 64, and the game runs…albeit like a pig. And that’s on my Q6600 + GTX280 + 4GB RAM. With render quality and textures set to medium I’m regularly seeing frame rates dip under 20. Ug.
Oh my god.
That’s the same rig I have (E8400 instead of Q6600 but same difference for games). This is a rig which can run every game I’ve tried on literally the highest graphics, on a native resolution of 1680x1050. That includes Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, and Fallout 3.
Compare that rig to an Xbox 360 or PS3 and it would walk all over the consoles. There is no way GTA4’s engine is really that demanding… they must have done virtually no optimization.
BTW, you have to substract 9-10 fps from the benchmark to have the real perfomance of the game. It’s better to play some minutes with FRAPS activated to see how the game runs.
From what I can tell, Rockstar Toronto did the porting work.
Now, I’m not saying they’re not talented or anything… but going by their previous work (which consists solely of The Warriors and some PS2 ports), did they really look like a good pick for handling the PC version of Take Two’s biggest game of the year?
I guess we should just be grateful they didn’t have Mad Doc Software (Rockstar New England) do it.
While I didn’t use FRAPS, I played it a half an hour and it ran fine.
Well that didn’t take long. Scene website RLSLog is reporting that GTA IV has just been cracked by “FCUKTHESCENE” who’ve released their anti-DRM files for anyone with the game.
For end-users, it’s apparently as easy as overwriting a couple of files and it eliminates the need to login to GFW Live, Rockstar Social Club, download DRM-enabled menus or deal with Securom-related checks.
A quick skimming of the aforementioned site seems to indicate that it’s “cracked” if you consider not being able to save, wonky, random camera effects and frequent crashing “cracked”.
Sounds just like what everyone else is playing, so yeah, I think it counts in this case!
An interesting quote from Kotaku’s mention of GTA IV problems:
The main bone of contention seems to be with the game’s graphics settings. Even powerful PCs are being forced to run the game at low settings (and even then, there are numerous texture errors), Rockstar responding with “higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available.”
Well fuck you too Rockstar. Its not our fault you didn’t optimize your engine that was running fine on three year old 360 hardware.
To be fair, I’m not having any problems and running the game on my system with the default settings it configured during install it runs and looks a lot better than the game did on the 360
So they will need another week or so for a real crack (just like Mass Effect)… Then every fucking 13 year old pirate can gloat about the idiots who spent 50 €/$ for craptastic performance with draconic drm…
Sadly I think “quality” releases like this enlarge the pirate community further…
As long as you can´t bring a pc game back to the retailer, there won´t be an incentive for certain publishers for real QA, it seems.
I’m going to hold out for a week or two and see how R* takes care of the issues. I know the gameplay is solid, and performance issues can get resolved.
Honestly I don’t know why anyone buys on day 1 anymore, nearly all the AAA PC releases are full of Internet hate the first few weeks.
I have no interest in GTA 4 for the PC, but I’d guess that if you run it in the only resolution supported on the Xbox 360 version (1280x720), it probably runs really well.
Also, while the 360 is 3 years old, there are still aspects of its shared memory design and guaranteed multiproc/multicore architecture that make some graphical effects way easier to do fast than on a PC even with the very newest highest end videocard.
Does that mean we’ve gotten crocodiles? Fuck, what do we do? HOW DO WE PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!11!!!1?
In accordance with Rockstar’s implementation of “future-ready” tech, I will be picking up GTA4 for PC in 2011.