nCaine

I have the drive defragmented , but its old one lyla .

bigal , can you point me why i need 3 gigs , while having 2 it dont use all of it ??? and still uses page file . why the game dont utilize all of my mem , i dont get it , bad coding ???

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-----------------And if someone gave you a pile of gold, you'd probably complain that it was too heavy-------------------

lyla

The game won't do caching on map information etc. beyond what it loads up, which it will do purely based on your view settings, i.e. distance etc. So it is up to windows to figure out the file caching, so certainly having more memory would help it, also Vista is just far better at it than XP.

mkey

I made tests on my system (TBH I spent more time running tests and benchmarks then I did playing the freaking game) with various hardware monitors (Everest, Riva Tuner) that logged the percentage of occupied system memory. Anyway, on Windows7 64 bit (this one runs GTA IV the best) the game starts on some 700MB of RAM as you load the game, goes to some 1.5GB when you load the city and it just goes up from there. It went past 2.5GB in under 45 minutes. It usually starts stuttering at this point. Each time you load a savegame it gets back to some 1.5GB and it increases memory usage from there.

So, when someone says 2GB is a minimum requirement with this game, I say bollocks. You need two things a) a 64bit system becasue a 32 bit system can't allocate as much RAM as this beast needs and b) 4GB of RAM to be sure. Of course, this issue is not so evident on all systems. Somewhere it eats RAM up slowly, somewhere it will crash inside 5 minutes.

The side effects vary as well. From sound looping issues, lag, to game and complete system crashes. I guess in some cases you get only stuttering when the RAM fills up. If you reload a savegame or CTR+ALT+DEL out and back into the game or restart the game you get back at square one. If you get sound issues or the game crashes, then it probably started to overwrite areas in it's own memory footprint and so on.

Here's the image I made for some other occasion


I run it on medium texture pack, with most settings on high or very high, without any norestrict options (which IMO make things a lot worse).

Also, you might try the -memrestrict tweak as described on GTAforums. Pinned topic in troubleshooting section for GTAIV. It usually boils down to using this commandline

-memrestrict <your screen width>*<your screen height>*<your VRAM amount in MB>*2

Start form there and tune it up a bit. It helps with the memory leak problem quite a bit, but of course not on all systems.

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nCaine

Good info bro.

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-----------------And if someone gave you a pile of gold, you'd probably complain that it was too heavy-------------------

bigal

Game booster really helped me with the stability of gta 4.

mkey

This game aroused loads of attention on PC, but for the wrong reasons.

What I discovered helps the most is a clean system with minimum of fuss on the drives. The best case scenario - a separate drive/partition for GTA only. Seriously.

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