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Core i7 @ 3.6Ghz vs Phenom @ 3.6 GTA4 Face off

The i7's benchmark lists cpu usage as 1/3rd of the phenom's though. Wonder what the bottleneck could be...memory speed perhaps? The game doesn't seem to benefit greatly from better graphics cards.
 
Originally posted by: Fox5
The i7's benchmark lists cpu usage as 1/3rd of the phenom's though. Wonder what the bottleneck could be...memory speed perhaps? The game doesn't seem to benefit greatly from better graphics cards.
Click to expand...

Hard drive lag? A few people on other forums were saying that uninstalling the hard drive to get it out to "PIO mode" greatly improved frame rate. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a fancy way of saying hard drive lag.
I noticed that this game also lags out hard if stuff like emule and utorrent are running in the background. CPU priority has absolutely no effect, but closing the programs makes a world of difference. No other game I own has this problem.
 
Originally posted by: Fox5
The i7's benchmark lists cpu usage as 1/3rd of the phenom's though. Wonder what the bottleneck could be...memory speed perhaps? The game doesn't seem to benefit greatly from better graphics cards.
Click to expand...

If the i7 had hyperthreading enabled then it will appear as 8 cores to windows and if GTA 4 doesn't benefit from HT at all then that CPU usage % is artificially low.
 
@Udgnim
probably the the testers monitor is limited to 60hz. it wouldn't make any difference anyway to the results unless vsync is turned on
 
How exactly is GTA4 the most CPU demanding game? Try Crysis perhaps?

To be honest both game engines are just highly unoptimized.
 
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
How exactly is GTA4 the most CPU demanding game? Try Crysis perhaps?

To be honest both game engines are just highly unoptimized.
Click to expand...

I agree with your unoptimized comment but it cannot be denied that there is a huge performance penalty by using a dual over a quad at the same clock speed. I'm quite sure you have seen this Review
 
Originally posted by: ashishmishra
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
How exactly is GTA4 the most CPU demanding game? Try Crysis perhaps?

To be honest both game engines are just highly unoptimized.
Click to expand...

I agree with your unoptimized comment but it cannot be denied that there is a huge performance penalty by using a dual over a quad at the same clock speed. I'm quite sure you have seen this Review
Click to expand...

Hrm, no actually I never bothered to look. Mostly because I played GTA4 like a year ago on my PS3 and have since forgotten about it. Not to mention that I do not like when a company ports a game to the PC in such a poor way.

But that is sort of...odd. Like how can a quad at 3.8Ghz be faster than a 4Ghz dual unless it actually makes use of those 4 cores. I guess it does...but then I'd love to see games offload MORE processing to the GPU and use 100% of it's power first. That would make games even better experiences I'd like to think.
 
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Originally posted by: ashishmishra
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
How exactly is GTA4 the most CPU demanding game? Try Crysis perhaps?

To be honest both game engines are just highly unoptimized.
Click to expand...

I agree with your unoptimized comment but it cannot be denied that there is a huge performance penalty by using a dual over a quad at the same clock speed. I'm quite sure you have seen this Review
Click to expand...

Hrm, no actually I never bothered to look. Mostly because I played GTA4 like a year ago on my PS3 and have since forgotten about it. Not to mention that I do not like when a company ports a game to the PC in such a poor way.

But that is sort of...odd. Like how can a quad at 3.8Ghz be faster than a 4Ghz dual unless it actually makes use of those 4 cores. I guess it does...but then I'd love to see games offload MORE processing to the GPU and use 100% of it's power first. That would make games even better experiences I'd like to think.
Click to expand...

Like you said it is a lazy port, it seems they made good use of the tri core power pc in the X360 and the cell in the PS3 and didn't do much optimization to cut down on CPU usage.

Also I noticed one more thing, it eats VRAM like crazy once you go up in resolution, set texture to high and start increasing your draw distance, I play at what I thought was a modest 1680x1050 but it seems like it needs more than 1GB VRAM :shocked: to max out 1680x1050
 
Hrm...that's weird because the textures aren't that detailed or high rez to begin with. To eat up your Vram is just not right.
 
It eats up everything. During GTA IV my system memory is getting eaten at around 75-80%. I haven't yet seen a game to use so much ram, until now. What bothers me is that, with all this resources that it takes, the game still looks quite ugly. There is no AA and the shadows are extremely horrible. It looks to me that this is porting gone totally wrong.
 
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Hrm...that's weird because the textures aren't that detailed or high rez to begin with. To eat up your Vram is just not right.
Click to expand...

It does look better than the 360 version if I am honest but yes, I hope the patch helps in reducing the vram and CPU usage. To think my rig is not enough to play it maxed at 1680x1050 just feels wrong 😛

One tip to anyone that is having issues is to first reduce texture to medium, that will help a lot and then reduce vehicle density to reduce CPU usage. It will still look and run better than the console versions.
 
Originally posted by: ashishmishra
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Hrm...that's weird because the textures aren't that detailed or high rez to begin with. To eat up your Vram is just not right.
Click to expand...

It does look better than the 360 version if I am honest but yes, I hope the patch helps in reducing the vram and CPU usage. To think my rig is not enough to play it maxed at 1680x1050 just feels wrong 😛

One tip to anyone that is having issues is to first reduce texture to medium, that will help a lot and then reduce vehicle density to reduce CPU usage. It will still look and run better than the console versions.
Click to expand...

Well, let me put it this way. A game like Crysis. It looks probably 10x better than GTA in terms of texture resolution, poly count, and post processing effects. Yet you can basically max that game out at 1680x1050 and it is playable, not 30+fps but you can enjoy the game at those settings with the right system. Yet GTA4 is not. That indicates a problem with game code.

Like you said, hopefully they can work it out. I can't really say I like the game all that much anyway, but it shouldn't be unplayable in the situations it is.
 
Originally posted by: error8
It eats up everything. During GTA IV my system memory is getting eaten at around 75-80%. I haven't yet seen a game to use so much ram, until now. What bothers me is that, with all this resources that it takes, the game still looks quite ugly. There is no AA and the shadows are extremely horrible. It looks to me that this is porting gone totally wrong.
Click to expand...

Yeah, just a poor port. Remember Halo, how terrible that port was. Same deal here. It runs poorly when it really should not. Sadly it seems like this may be the future of PC gaming in some ways. Consoles selling so much better than PC games and it is harder to pirate PS3 and Xbox games than it is PC games, so I think some devs would just port games over months after the console release and hope they can get at least a few sales on a game that is past its prime and has stagnant sales.

There are only a few true PC game developers left who are willing to write PC specific versions of a game. Bethseda, Crytek, Bilzzard, Valve, ID Software although they haven't been active of late, I guess Activision with Call of Duty although I don't know how much of the game is built especially for a PC, and UbiSoft. I'm not even sure if Fallout 3 or FarCry 2 was written specifically for the PC seeing as it was a simultaneous release for Consoles as well. However, both games run well on a PC so at least there's that.

Anyway, you shouldn't need an i7 or even a Q9550 at 3.8Ghz to get any sort of performance out of GTA4 and I hope this isn't indicative of future PC games. *crosses fingers*
 
Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Originally posted by: Fox5
The i7's benchmark lists cpu usage as 1/3rd of the phenom's though. Wonder what the bottleneck could be...memory speed perhaps? The game doesn't seem to benefit greatly from better graphics cards.
Click to expand...

Hard drive lag? A few people on other forums were saying that uninstalling the hard drive to get it out to "PIO mode" greatly improved frame rate. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a fancy way of saying hard drive lag.
I noticed that this game also lags out hard if stuff like emule and utorrent are running in the background. CPU priority has absolutely no effect, but closing the programs makes a world of difference. No other game I own has this problem.
Click to expand...

If that's the case, go to Computer, right click on your hard drive, click properties, then the hardware tab, then the properties tab, enable admin control if necessary (whatever it calls it) then the policies tab, and then enable advanced performance. It will enable windows to use your memory as a virtual file system until the harddrive is ready for reads/writes. If your idea is right, that should help the GTA4 lag. (the game is streaming data from the harddrive constantly to load in geometry/textures I guess)
 
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