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GTAIV Issues on MBP

K

Kraiden

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 7, 2011
6
0
Ok, I'm at a loss with this one.

I recently got myself a spiffy new MacBook Pro. 2.2ghz i7, 6750m, 4gb ram, all well and good. I have Bootcamped Windows 7 Ultimate, and everything is up to date and running smoothly.

However, I can't for the life of me get Grand Theft Auto IV running at a respectable level, which is doing my head in. I can run everything else just fine and at max settings, such as Crysis 2, Batman, Just Cause 2, etc... But GTAIV runs like it's stuck in quicksand, which makes no sense.

I've tried various drivers for the graphics card, made sure all but the bare essential processes have been killed off, tweaked command line settings for the game, re-installed it twice and tried every version, from out of the box to 1.0.0.7. nothing.

Get this: I run it at the native resolution (1680x1050) and if I set it *lower* the performance gets *worse*.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this? I was looking forward to christening it with GTAIV, but since I went from my old desktop which can barely run it above 15fps (Core 2 duo) to my first ever Quad Core laptop, It's bizarre that it runs *worse* on a machine that is much more powerful.
 
According to this site, on high you'll only get an average of 28 fps. Even on low settings, you won't average 60fps.

What kind of performance are you getting?
 
Kraiden said:
Ok, I'm at a loss with this one.

I recently got myself a spiffy new MacBook Pro. 2.2ghz i7, 6750m, 4gb ram, all well and good. I have Bootcamped Windows 7 Ultimate, and everything is up to date and running smoothly.

However, I can't for the life of me get Grand Theft Auto IV running at a respectable level, which is doing my head in. I can run everything else just fine and at max settings, such as Crysis 2, Batman, Just Cause 2, etc... But GTAIV runs like it's stuck in quicksand, which makes no sense.

I've tried various drivers for the graphics card, made sure all but the bare essential processes have been killed off, tweaked command line settings for the game, re-installed it twice and tried every version, from out of the box to 1.0.0.7. nothing.

Get this: I run it at the native resolution (1680x1050) and if I set it *lower* the performance gets *worse*.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this? I was looking forward to christening it with GTAIV, but since I went from my old desktop which can barely run it above 15fps (Core 2 duo) to my first ever Quad Core laptop, It's bizarre that it runs *worse* on a machine that is much more powerful.
Click to expand...


I'd check the "extreme cpu tweak" thread if you want to try it out. My 330M was getting about 30-40fps in league of legends on very high/high shadows kicked it up to 60-70fps w/o external display. Sorry if im on uneducated info but supposedly if you got a high % in gpu or cpu it throttle the other one or the other down. oh and also check your power settings :D
 
nnoob said:
This post will help the GTAIV FPS
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1203927/
Click to expand...

I'll give that a whirl, but only as a last resort. :/

awer25 said:
According to this site, on high you'll only get an average of 28 fps. Even on low settings, you won't average 60fps.

What kind of performance are you getting?
Click to expand...

Around 15fps, but when driving it grinds down to about 2fps every second or so. Drive down the road, it's constantly stopping and starting.

I wasn't expecting something unreasonable like 60fps across the board, but the fact this runs worse than my desktop is just confusing, even more so when every other game I've tested out blitzes along.

jshdaley said:
Are you running 64-bit? I was running win7 32-bit and it only allows 2gb ram, so i had to upgrade.

If you are try Game Booster, it shuts down all un-nessicary activity and squeezes that extra bit of power from your mac.

It real makes a difference from lagging and a bearable frame-rate!
Click to expand...

I'd try that, but the only thing installed on my 64 bit Windows install is Steam and GTA. Nothing else is running in the background, no antivirus, no other programs, just steam and GTA.
 
I think it's a horribly written game for the PC. You can check out different forums and people running the game on their desktops are still, presently, complaining about how laggy it is.

Sometimes, driving around for a while, helps with some of the stuttering. It's almost as if the textures needed to be loaded into the GPU's memory. That's one thing I noticed when I used to play it, but I got tired of the bad performance and quit about 10 missions shy of beating it.
 
Kraiden said:
I'll give that a whirl, but only as a last resort. :/



Around 15fps, but when driving it grinds down to about 2fps every second or so. Drive down the road, it's constantly stopping and starting.

I wasn't expecting something unreasonable like 60fps across the board, but the fact this runs worse than my desktop is just confusing, even more so when every other game I've tested out blitzes along.



I'd try that, but the only thing installed on my 64 bit Windows install is Steam and GTA. Nothing else is running in the background, no antivirus, no other programs, just steam and GTA.
Click to expand...
The game is very CPU intensive, it not GPU problem because of the game's poor cpu optimization, I Think you need to check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JdRUHHn0UM
 
deadwulfe said:
I think it's a horribly written game for the PC. You can check out different forums and people running the game on their desktops are still, presently, complaining about how laggy it is.
Click to expand...

This.

I still play GTA frequently on my PC and it is still very laggy even though I have more than decent specs. They pretty much just ported it over from the Xbox version, in fact if you try to join a multi player game before loading the game it will show the xbox buttons when the "are you sure you want to join a...." screen pops up. Which is sad because its such a good game with a lot of great mods.
 
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The problem isn't your computer. It is the crappy porting job that gta iv is. Even on superhigh end pcs, this game struggles to run decently. Such rigs can however run metro 2033 and other intensive games at full quality at high resolutions.
 
Well, I gave throttlestop a quick run, and...

Didn't work. :(

However, I think my computer might not throttle itself, because with Throttlestop both running and just monitoring, I didn't see any change in CPU speed at all while GTAIV was running. Maybe my MacBook doesn't throttle itself?

I'm thinking that it could be a driver issue with the HD6750m, since GTAIV apparently runs just fine on the older MacBook Pro's with Nvidia cards in them (330m?), and actually had a fairly consistent frame rate on my old Core 2 Duo 2009 MacBook as well. (Sure, at low everything, but 20fps on average)

This sucks, look like I'll be keeping this as my work computer and not bothering having bootcamp be my desktop replacement at home. Shame, because GTAIV is one of my favorite games to waste away the hours with.

EDIT: Also, I know well enough how crappy it is, because I bought on release day and couldn't play it for a *week* because it was totally, 100% crippled. Aside from the 4 layers of sign ups, and taking 2 hours to install, I couldn't even play it because the entire world was invisible, and suffered from a huge memory leak. Good job, Rockstar.
 
Kraiden said:
Well, I gave throttlestop a quick run, and...

Didn't work. :(

However, I think my computer might not throttle itself, because with Throttlestop both running and just monitoring, I didn't see any change in CPU speed at all while GTAIV was running. Maybe my MacBook doesn't throttle itself?

I'm thinking that it could be a driver issue with the HD6750m, since GTAIV apparently runs just fine on the older MacBook Pro's with Nvidia cards in them (330m?), and actually had a fairly consistent frame rate on my old Core 2 Duo 2009 MacBook as well. (Sure, at low everything, but 20fps on average)

This sucks, look like I'll be keeping this as my work computer and not bothering having bootcamp be my desktop replacement at home. Shame, because GTAIV is one of my favorite games to waste away the hours with.

EDIT: Also, I know well enough how crappy it is, because I bought on release day and couldn't play it for a *week* because it was totally, 100% crippled. Aside from the 4 layers of sign ups, and taking 2 hours to install, I couldn't even play it because the entire world was invisible, and suffered from a huge memory leak. Good job, Rockstar.
Click to expand...
What was the DTS and max while playing gta4 and running throttlestop, also get a screenshot with gta and throttlestop..
 
Kraiden said:
DTS was about 14-17 with throttle stop on.
Click to expand...

hm it not overheating, DTS @ 0 = throttling, Mine gets to 0 (thermal sensors are not accurate. source: intel) in gaming ... It could be a power requirement issues, you got an LCD monitor and disable the internal LCD?
 
nnoob said:
hm it not overheating, DTS @ 0 = throttling, Mine gets to 0 (thermal sensors are not accurate. source: intel) in gaming ... It could be a power requirement issues, you got an LCD monitor and disable the internal LCD?
Click to expand...

Haven't tried using an external monitor, but I'll give it a shot when I get home from work.

Still, the more and more I'm testing it, I'm thinking it's just a graphics driver issue, or GTAIV being a crappy port.
 
Kraiden said:
Haven't tried using an external monitor, but I'll give it a shot when I get home from work.

Still, the more and more I'm testing it, I'm thinking it's just a graphics driver issue, or GTAIV being a crappy port.
Click to expand...

It's GTA being a crappy port, no need to look any further, this has been a known issue for years now.
 
But I want it to work! It must work, because I want it to!

ww_053.jpg


Sadly, it does seem more and more like it's an issue with the game itself or the Radeon drivers. Bugger.
 
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