Help with GTA 4 (complete edition) CHOPPINESS after about a minute of gameplay

Discussion in 'Games, Gaming & Game-demos' started by oscare30, May 14, 2020.

  1. oscare30

    oscare30 Active Member

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    So since the newest update to GTA IV (were The DLC became free and got merged with the main game) I have this odd issue were after about a minute of gameplay the frame rate gets consistently choppy. Its weird....the FPS stays the same but it looks like the game is dropping every other frame! If I go into the game settings and turn the refresh rate down to 59 then the issue goes away ...but then comes back again after about a minute. Rinse repeat...the same result.

    Before Rockstar decided to do this update and I was just playing this thru STEAM there was never this issue.

    My core specs are as follows EVGA 1080ti with the latest drivers, i7 3770K O.C to 4.3 and 16gigs of ram. The game is installed on a 1TB SSD.

    This is the ONLY game I have this issue with

    ANYBODY else have this issue??? Any help is really appreciated!

    Thanks!
     
  2. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    GTA4 is cpu bound, turn your pedestrian sliders down.
     
  3. MaLDo

    MaLDo Master Guru

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    Is not your CPU.

    enable steam ingame interface and the problem will disappear.
     
  4. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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  5. Undying

    Undying Ancient Guru

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    You wont get rid of stuttering even if you upgrade to 9900k. The way its meant to be played.
     
  6. Dragam1337

    Dragam1337 Ancient Guru

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    Using g-sync with an fps cap lower than the hz of your monitor fixes this.
     
  7. oscare30

    oscare30 Active Member

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    Believe it or not turning ON the STEAM Overlay actually made the problem disappear(Maldo, I actually figured this out before you posted but thank you for the response)....but WHY?

    I also have a frame cap in the NVIDIA settings at 60 plus using Nvidia V-Sunc ( In game V sync turned off)

    Why the hell is this game coded so badly!
     
  8. ramthegamer

    ramthegamer Ancient Guru

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    i remember this game needed a core2quad at 2,4 to run nicely, the first game that actually needed a quad core cpu to run as i remember
     
  9. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    This game doesn't use multicore at all.
     
  10. ramthegamer

    ramthegamer Ancient Guru

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    I couldn t run it with a core2duo back then, so it needs a core2quad as i said...
     

  11. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    lol...no.
     
  12. ramthegamer

    ramthegamer Ancient Guru

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    what do u mean? no, i had core2duo and this game wouldn t even load , so don t tell me no..
     
  13. CPC_RedDawn

    CPC_RedDawn Ancient Guru

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    i played the entire game on a X6800 core 2 duo and when i upgraded to a Q6600 I gained no increased performance. A friend of mine played the entire game on an E6300 overclocked to 3.4GHz also. I seems this issue might of bee on your end.
     
  14. ramthegamer

    ramthegamer Ancient Guru

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    It cannot be that my gpu was the problem...
     
  15. KissSh0t

    KissSh0t Ancient Guru

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    Has Games For Widows Live been removed from GTA 4 yet?
     

  16. CPC_RedDawn

    CPC_RedDawn Ancient Guru

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    I doubt it, the game was programmed with single core CPU's in mind. As at the time CPU's were still focused on the "GHz race" and companies were still just "gluing CPU's together" to make multicore chips and not to forget that Windows XP and Vista didn't really have great multithreading support. Then there is the move to DX10 API from DX9 which was used for yearss which allowed hardware to be pretty damn optimised for it. Then also factor in Games For Windows Live on top as well.

    There were too many variables with this game. The performance I got with both of those CPU's wasn't great by any means.
     
  17. ramthegamer

    ramthegamer Ancient Guru

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    It was the only game i couldn t run on my system:
    Core2duo 3.0
    4gb ram
    Gt8600
    Couldn t run this game at all...
     
  18. Turanis

    Turanis Guest

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    Well,do not ask what forum do for you,ask what do you for Forum.
    So,put this in your exec game dir(extract and put all x64 or x32 files).Try this in every game who have low performance.
    https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

    And do not forget to put Shadows on medium-low,because medium+ will depend on cpu,because consoles 30fps,etc.
    And use High Power plan.
     
    Last edited: May 17, 2020
  19. MaLDo

    MaLDo Master Guru

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    in the first version of the game, there was a constant judder in cinematics that was fixed when open the xbox live ingame panel.

    people that discuss cpu or gpu problems are not aware of the problem you was suffering. It’s the game that has problems synchronizing timers. Steam overlay fixes the problem.
     
  20. ant_sh

    ant_sh Member

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    After some research I came to the conclusion that the game itself is not the culprit here and choppiness/stutter is clearly a renderer issue as many people report that enabling steam overlay helped them and – surprise - DXVK works magic on GTA IV, e.g. even translating Direct3D calls to Vulkan is faster and has consistent fps+frametime! So I researched further and found that this crappy legacy D3D/DDraw renderer problem is very common with older games. It is usually solved by:

    1. Fixing native Windows D3D9 renderer with DDrawCompat – game looks as intended, gameplay is pretty smooth
    2. Avoiding crappy native renderer altogether and translating output to superior DX11, OpenGL or Vulkan renderers – game looks nearly as intended, gameplay is silky smooth, 3-5 fps may be lost in translation 8) but DXVK method may even yield fps!
    I tried different methods from two groups above with GTA IV and they were the only reliable ones that helped to achieve smooth gameplay and consistent frametime in Algonquin.

    So here’s quick-n-dirty method that fixes native D3D renderer

    • Install Ultimate ASI Loader (already installed in FitGirl repack)
    • Download dxwrapper, unpack dxwrapper.asi/.ini into GTA IV folder or plugins subfolder
    • Edit dxwrapper.ini
      [Compatibility]
      DDrawCompat = 1
    • ATTENTION: DDrawCompat on multi-core CPU will load 1st core at 100% by default. To load cores evenly the following must be enabled in dxwrapper.ini:
      [DDrawCompat]
      DDrawCompatNoProcAffinity = 1
    • Optionally may enable antialiasing here if it is not already enabled in nVidia/AMD driver settings:
      [d3d9]
      AntiAliasing = 1
    For extensive research of different methods to fix choppiness and stutters in GTA IV see my blog post
     

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