My specs and a question

[Riv3T]

Greetings and Salutations GTA Community!!!

I was hopeing that someone may know some tips or tweaks I may be able to use to optimize my GTA 4. I am currently experiencing a lot of lag when it rains, not to where its unplayable, but driveing is rather difficult and all aound lag, just that when it rains I tend to go and save the game to bypass the time that its raining.

Windows vista home premium 32 bit OS

Intel pentium D 3.00 Ghz

2.00 GB RAM

Nvidia 8500 GT 256 MB DDR2

Like I said the game is playable, I've tried a tweak that allows me to turn the bloom effects down, but after doing so I noticed no real framerate increase. I shutdown as many processes in Taskmanager as I could and set GTA IV to "High Priority"

I assume my problem lie with the video card haveing only 256 MB of RAM. I am hopeing someone out there might be able to help me with a tweak or two.

I got to a mission where I had to chase some bikers through the subway and whilst rideing the bike in there the game plays real smooth, I assume thats because there isn't much to rnder in the tunnel, but thats the only taste of smooth gameplay I have witnessed thus far while playing the game.

I don't have the funds to upgrade my system and probably wont for awhile, my MOBO only has two slots for RAM and it wont do any good to get double Gig sticks as it only supports 2 Gb total. So tweaks or tips are my only option.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

~Riv

[davesta]

Greetings and Salutations GTA Community!!!

I was hopeing that someone may know some tips or tweaks I may be able to use to optimize my GTA 4. I am currently experiencing a lot of lag when it rains, not to where its unplayable, but driveing is rather difficult and all aound lag, just that when it rains I tend to go and save the game to bypass the time that its raining.

Windows vista home premium 32 bit OS

Intel pentium D 3.00 Ghz

2.00 GB RAM

Nvidia 8500 GT 256 MB DDR2

Like I said the game is playable, I've tried a tweak that allows me to turn the bloom effects down, but after doing so I noticed no real framerate increase. I shutdown as many processes in Taskmanager as I could and set GTA IV to "High Priority"

I assume my problem lie with the video card haveing only 256 MB of RAM. I am hopeing someone out there might be able to help me with a tweak or two.

I got to a mission where I had to chase some bikers through the subway and whilst rideing the bike in there the game plays real smooth, I assume thats because there isn't much to rnder in the tunnel, but thats the only taste of smooth gameplay I have witnessed thus far while playing the game.

I don't have the funds to upgrade my system and probably wont for awhile, my MOBO only has two slots for RAM and it wont do any good to get double Gig sticks as it only supports 2 Gb total. So tweaks or tips are my only option.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

~Riv

I don't really think that there's much you can do short of updrading your system. An 8500GT isn't a very good card even with 512mb of memory, let alone the version you have. I used to have one and it struggled even to play San Andreas. I don't know much about the processor, but I've heard that pentium duos aren't very good either.

One thing which could help is to install a clean version of windows on dual boot, just for games. This will allow you to disable all of the crap that runs in the background.

Also, this might work for you:

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=384473

[Riv3T]

Thank you very much for speedy reply and link man. I was playing the game just a bit ago and it was ok... started to lag a bit more than usual so I shut 'er down and rebooted then stopped by here to see if anyone replied. Going to check that link now, I'll reply as to wether or not it helped but thanks a bunch for your time

[Riv3T]

Well, I read that post in the link Davesta, it states tht you can run the game in a higher resolution with less FPS loss. It worked, I can run the game at 1024x768, but I gained no FPS. I currently am running the game at 800x600 and am having issues with lag and very little FPS.

These are my current commandline parameters:

-novblank -frameLimit 2 -refreshrate 60 -availablevidmem 0.86 -noprecache -minspecaudio -height 1024 -width 768

And my specs again:

Windows vista home premium 32 bit OS

Intel pentium D 3.00 Ghz

2.00 GB RAM

Nvidia 8500 GT 256 MB DDR2

Anyone have any ideas? Theres got to be a way to increase my FPS. I dont mind running the game at 800x600, sure it sucks, but ive already gotten 50% into the game and am really hopeing theres something I'm missing.

[JustADummy]

Something's strange in there:

My 8500GT is 512MB and it isn't overclocked...

[Righty]

Overclocking wouldn't affect the memory of the video card - the memory and gpu speeds it would.

There are multiple versions of the card by different manufacturers. Some had 512, some had 256.