Be Excellent To Each Other

So this made me buy the Gay Tony expansion. Turns out I last played this nearly 3 years ago! Bloody hell.

Final version of this now out.

Fucking hell it's pretty.

Yeah, saw that on EG earlier. Bejesus, it does look good. I've had it on my Steam account for ages but I'm downloading it again now...

Is it easy to install these days?

The Grand Theft Auto Complete Pack is £4.99 on Steam currently. Might as well, at that price!

Hmmm... i7 processor and a 6970 graphics card, and GTA IV still randomly turns into a juddery mess at every corner...

I don't even think the iCEnhancer makes a huge amount of difference, sure the car models are much much better, but the rest isn't that amazing.

That really shouldn't be the case Trooper, on a similarly specced PC I had the game silky smooth at 1900x1200.

You need to watch out for VRAM usage when setting the options, and IIRC leave AA at 2X, you don't really need it at high resolutions anyway.

Is that your iMac? (You have an iMac, right?) If so, it's a 6970M, not a 6970. It's less powerful.

No, it's my gaming pc

Then there's something wrong with it!

Unless ATI are having one of their really shit driver phases or something.

I can run everything else with no bother
I expect my tolerance is lower than most for this sort of thing, I really notice frame rates.

Don't suppose you could give me a screenshot of all your graphics settings? I'll match them and see what I think.

BOOM! You got served!

If the ECU on your Ferrari is playing up, I suggest trying it on a clapped out Fiesta.

You know there are Ferrari model computers, right?

I can't afford one, though.

There's Ferrari all sorts of tat, they really aren't terribly precious about their brand, same with Porsche really.

Actually, the Ferrari laptops are (or used to be, at least) really good.
They've got some deal with Acer (or, again, did have) to make sure they're always a little bit quicker than the Lambo ones, too

Owning anything, even the car, which is branded Ferrari makes you look like a complete twat.

I haven't got the game installed at the moment Trooper, although I did put a screenshot in the other GTA thread, I'll see if I can find it.

Here you go, it managed a reasonably steady 55-60FPS at these settings, albeit with some slowdowns when it got really busy, but the game was basically smooth and playable at all times, with no input lag.

It certainly never went below around 40FPS as I recall.

EDIT - I didn't have vehicle density at that level though as it was impossible to actually get around the city.

Cheers, I'm running at a higher resolution but much much lower draw distance. It runs happily a lot of the time and chugs when going round random corners.

I shall have a play around, I suspect it is probably shit drivers, but like I mentioned, I have no problems on other games.

Ooohhhh fucking hell you're not trying to run it at 2560x1440 are you?

Since I got my 27 inch monitor I've discovered that some games simply will not run at that res properly, BF3 is the main culprit, whatever I do with that it just chugs at around 30-45FPS with the odd 'jitter' that makes it unacceptable from a play experience. (Dropping everything right down to low makes a bit of difference, but not much.)

Some games I've managed to tweak to get solid at 60FPS+ at 2560x1440 (DiRT2 and DiRT3), but BF3 is having none of it. (I just run that scaled at 1920x1080 and TBH it looks fine.)

I suspect GTAIV's graphics engine is one of those that just won't 'do' 2560x1440 on last-gen cards, you'd most likely need to chuck something like a GTX680 at it.

Of course I'm running at super rez, go big or go home I say

It's the same jitter I'm getting on gta, I'll drop the Rez and have a play, but I've just bought the witcher 2 and it's guild wars 2 beta weekend this weekend, so it'll have to wait a bit

30-45 FPS is unacceptable? isn't telly only 24?

Telly is 50 or 60 some film is 24.

Film, telly, whatevs. Either way, if I'm watching Pirates of the Caribbean at 24fps and Depp doesn't appear to be in jerkovision, why isn't it the same in GTA4?

Oh no, he didn't.

Even I'm not going there this time

Seriously, I don't understand. If 24fps looks seamless to me in a film, why would 60fps on a PC look better? It's like the 16 million colour thing with SVGA and onwards - the human eye can't differentiate that many colours anyway.

I'm not trolling or anything, I'm genuinely interested.

You need a Ferrari to enjoy games the best. If you don't have one just forgeddaboudid.

I've done this before Mr K but I guess you didn't read those threads

There's a big difference between film and games when it comes to framerate, in simple terms films have motion blur built into them, whereby one frame 'blurs' into the next (just pause any DVD when there's any kind of movement on screen, wherever stuff is changing dramatically from one frame to the next, the picture is blurred).

Games don't have that, so the brain perceives the 'jump' from one frame to the next far more easily.

So whereas a film running at 24FPS can appear smooth, a game running at 24FPS will be noticeably jerky as each frame is an absolutely distinct image.

Most TFTs have a refresh rate of 60Hz, so if a console/PC can chuck out 60FPS, the game will appear as smooth as possible on that screen to the human eye. (There are now 120Hz screens of course, which is a whole different thing, although you're then getting into the realms of what the human eye can actually perceive.)

Short answer, it's down to motion blur.

(Some games do build motion blur in, which can, to an extent, achieve the same effect as motion blur in films.)

Now there have been some discussions about this here at BEEX before...... (to say the least)...... Some folks don't mind 30FPS (which is what console games are generally targeted at), some folks say they can't tell the difference between 30FPS and 60FPS or anything inbetween.

Personally speaking I hate 30FPS, it genuinely gives me a headache after an extended play session. I didn't need FRAPS to tell me that BF3 was running at 30-45FPS when I upped the resolution to 2560x1440, because I could very easily perceive it, which is why I've sacrificed resolution to get the framerate back up to 60FPS (or very close to it, above a constant 50FPS and certainly 55FPS, you then hit a 'perceptual 60FPS').

There's no 'definitive answer' I suppose, the Eurogamer face-offs always place a large emphasis on framerate, in particular how the CoD series always aims for the 'holy grail' of 60FPS at the expense of graphical fidelity. (30FPS basically doubles the input lag from 60FPS, for example.)



EDIT - Some reading here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

Isn't the answer here to just put motion blur in games, and stop people dick waving over their 3d accelerator? Because by your explanation, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a game with film style 24fps blurred and 60fps non-blurred.

It's basically explained on this page and effectively says what I would, the 'maximum FPS' bit is the most relevant section. (He also links to a couple of other good articles too.)

It also contains a very telling single frame grab of Aliens the film which runs at at 24FPS (where a large chunk of the screen is literally just a blur) and a single frame grab of the game Alien Vs Predator captured at 60FPS (although the point in a way is that it wouldn't matter what the framerate was, a game screen grab will always be a perfect distinct image which is why our eyes perceive it so clearly, so the slower it refreshes the more we notice it).

http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_5.html

If it's a case of TL:DR then the answer is motion blur can help to an extent in some gaming situations (which is why it's used quite extensively in 30FPS capped console titles) but it has pretty serious limitations.

In simple terms, when it comes to games, there's no replacement for raw FPS, and the closer you can get to the refresh rate of the screen (60Hz for the vast majority of cases), the better.

I follow you, but I still don't get why it works very well for films (in motion. Of course a frame grab is going to be blurred, but you don't watch a film as a series of stills), but not games. I may well read your linked articles tomorrow at some point.

I'm guessing, because without knowing what the next frame is gonna look like, it's quite difficult to blur the two together effectively.

24fps isn't really 24fps, is the simple answer. Each frame is something of a composite of several states. For a computer to calculate all those states and blur them together would be more expensive than the current method for no real gain and some rather large losses.

It's possible to perform a kind of fake motion blur but it's not overly effective, and implementation depending could look really very bad indeed with framerate drops.

This thread is informative.

Needs more pictures of kittens.


But not animated. At any frame rate.

The other thing with frame rate (at least 10 years ago, when I cared about it) is if you're playing multiplayer, you want to see what the other person is doing as quickly as possible, if the frame rate is only 30fps then you have to wait 33ms before you see them move (ignoring any input lag, connection lag, response time etc).

Reducing that to 16ms (60fps) or 8ms (120 fps) can give you a big advantage.

Malc

Cripes, I have learnt something.

Thank you to those taking the time to explain things to the ignorant.

Next question - why bother with a PC when you can play it on the 360? consoles are better, right?

Tried these settings and it still runs like utter dogshit.
Run the benchmark and I get an average of just 15fps.

Core i7 920 2.7Ghz
HD6970 graphics card.

Don't make no sense to me, I should be able to run with everything on

The benchmark on GTA IV was showing system memory topping out at 97% though, it couldn't have anything to do with that could it?

I'm going to download and run 3dmark to check that everything is performing as it should.

That's seriously not right man.

The benchmark is actually very 'tame' and not representative of the real game, you should be looking for a solid 60FPS+ in the benchmark.

I may be reinstalling GTAIV myself to take a look at the last iteration of the iceenhancer thingy, but for now I don't have it installed so can't really help too much I'm afraid.

Ran 3dmark, it told me that everything was working fine. 19000 on the directx 10 vantage thingy, which is a bit lower than the average for this card (23000), but mine is totally standard and unclocked, so I expected that.

Nowt appears to be wrong on my machine, GTA IV just runs like crap.

Seems i'm not alone, a bit of googling shows a few others in the same boat.
I'm fully up to date on drivers and patches. but it appears either ATI or Rockstar need to fix something, which I doubt is going to happen.

This has given me the kick I needed to bump up my ram on the system anyway, so once i've replaced that i'll try again just in case, but I doubt i'll have any luck.

The joys of PC gaming!

Ah well, The Witcher 2 is almost downloaded from steam, that'll keep me occupied, and I bet it'll run great