GTA IV (Grand Theft Auto 4) for the PC is an atrociously ported game (It appears not to have been optimized to run smoothly on even a high-end PC).
I am not going to buy a console. But I do want to play this game. I’ve bought (but not yet received) a GTX 295 to replace my 8800 ultra. (Not because of GTA IV. It’s a general purpose upgrade)
So will GTA IV run less pathetically on the 295 than it did on the Ultra?
And what other games should have a ‘better experience’ when played on a 295?
How much RAM does it have? If it’s anything like recent iterations, it has 1-2 GBs of RAM and other high end amenities, pretty much any game would perform better. If it’s only a slight upgrade over the 8800, then the high demand games like Doom 3, etc. would probably still sweat while you’re playing.
About 1.7gb of ram. Compared to around 0.7 on my 8800.
I never thought of Doom3 as a high demand game. It’s pretty old now.
You can pretty much run any game comfortably. If GTA IV continues to run poorly, it’s not your GPU.
Doom 3 was pretty high end, relative to my computer at the time. But I was really more referring to Doom 3’s contemporary equivalent, but I haven’t gamed much outside of EQ and WoW for for 7 years, so not sure what that is.
It’s actually under a gig of RAM (per GPU which is what matters). This card, as long as it’s running a game that will take good advantage of SLI, will smoke any other card in the market right now. So yes, you’re good 
And even though GTAIV was a rather poor port in terms of performance, PC gamers still get a city that feels more alive. There are more NPc’s and vehicles on the streets and they can be seen much further away than on the console. Detail is great at long distances as well. I gotta hand it to them, they did a great job in creating liberty city.
So does that mean:
The games won’t see the memory as one lot of 1.7gb?
And will older games that don’t make use of SLI only use one GPU?
The amount of Video RAM has just about as much to do with the overall performance of the videocard as “GHz” has to do with the performance of a CPU (read: not that much). Videocard manufactures routinely take advantage of this misconception and release crappy cards advertised with “1 GB RAM!”, because your typical consumer is just looking for the biggest number on the box.
The number of Stream Processors, Texture Units, Raster Operations Pipelines, and Memory bandwidth on a videocard are equally or more important than the total amount of memory.
A hypothetical 8800ultra with a full 2GB of memory would still run like an absolute piece of shit compared to a GTX 295, *even if the latter was crippled to only have 512MB of total RAM. *
RAM is only really relevant if you like to play at higher resolutions. I have a 512mb HD4870 which is fine for 1650x1080 (at least for the games I like) but I’d prefer at least 1gb of memory if I were to move up to 1920x1200.
Of course, give me a choice between my current card and a 8800GT with 2gb and I’ll still keep mine.
No games will not see 1.7 gigabytes of RAM. Also (as pointed out above) RAM doesn’t translate into performance in the same way that the number of stream processors, the speed of the GPU and RAM, and memory bandwidth does. Instead it places limits on how much can be held in the buffer to render. Things that increases the amount of RAM required to render the frame will run into a wall of sorts eventually, after which point performance will go down the crapper (or the game might even refuse to render anything!).
Things that increase memory requirements are resolution, anti-aliasing filtering, most post processing effects, level of detail and texture map quality. As a rule of thumb, 512 MB is good for 1680x1050 gaming and under, 768 and higher is good 1920x1200, while resolutions higher than that require at least 1 gig of VRAM.
Most games will take at least some advantage of SLI, even old ones, but, yes, for some, only one GPU will be utilized, and there are games where even if both GPU’s are being used, you might not see much performance boost when compared to a single GPU.
But even so, in most current games, this card smokes every other single GPU card out there. And even if it is only using one GPU it will still perform about as well as a GTX 280.
Is it really the case that it needs good SLI compatability? My understanding is that dual chip designs divide all their workload and cooperate by a hardware controller on the card - not needing a motherboard SLI interface, drivers, etc. And so their performance isn’t really like SLI of the two card variety. No incompatability issues or driver settings required - it just works more or less like a fast single processor card. Is the 295 different?
I agree with your general premise but this is
I agree with your general premise, but in a scenario where the card needs more than 512mb of memory the program will either not run or it will run very slowly as it has to copy video memory data back and forth from the system memory. The common user won’t get to the point where they max out 512mb currently, but people with rigs capable of 1920x1200 res with AA/AF effects can.
Well yes and no: The SLI controller is indeed inside the card, but it’s still two GPU’s interfacing through an SLI controller. The OS will see two different cards and game rendering engines (and the drivel model) will see the system as any old SLI system and use it just as it would any other SLI system. If a game performs poorly with two GTX 280’s in SLI, it will work poorly with a 295 as well.
That’s the thing - my understanding, at least the way ATI does it, is that the OS won’t see two seperate cards and the it will be invisible to the rendering engine. Everything is taken care of at the hardware level. Just like when you set up a raid 0 drive with 2 500gb drives with hardware raid, windows just views it as one 1gb drive… and sends data to it as if it were one drive, and the raid hardware determines how to stripe the data.
I’ve never actually had a dual-GPU card so I may be wrong but I’ve read that’s how it works.
Well, the game engine will always see a single card. That’s what SLI essentially does. It doesn’t matter if it’s a single card with two GPU’s or two separate cards. The two GPU’s still need the hardware support (in terms of the SLI controller and north bridge support) and software support (in terms of driver implementation and game engine optimization).
So as far as the game engine is concerned it’s drawing on a single card (this is handled by the drivers), the SLI hardware then kicks in and splits the frame rendering between the two GPU’s in the most efficient way it can. The game engine optimization (and driver level optimizations) can make this easier (better performance) or harder (poorer performance) for the hardware to accomplish efficiently. But this happens in essentially the same exact way whether it’s a 295 or two 280’s.
Just remember to go into the NVidia Control Panel and turn SLI on…
Be warned, the 295 sounds like an airfield, okay that’s not true, I run two of them. They’re definitely LOUDER (in that I can actually hear them), but my case fans don’t exactly shirk their share of noise either. Every game I’ve played so far has worked fine on them, with the exception of WoW which seems to need time to “sync” in some places (Storm Peaks is particularly bad, even when empty the mountains will eat your framerate until you’ve been there for a good hour in which case it will magically go to a nice 20).
A bit of a hijack, but have they resolved the bugs and incompatibilities that plagued the Windows version? Do you still need to install Windows live and Rockstar social, or is there a way to bypass them?
I’ve been playing GTA IV for about 4 days now on my Dual Core 2.53 and Radeon 4870, and it’s been pretty damn smooth and playable. I’ve only experienced a few seconds of slowdown, it’s been running fantastic.
Now for the bad part…
Yes, you still have to download, sign into, and update Rockstar Social club and Windows Live, and get a gamertag for WL, link the gamertag to the Social Club, update your flash player to v9 or above, download and install a couple Windows hotfixes, patch the game of course (there are 3 patches), and if you use ZoneAlarm you might have to turn it off until you figure out what permissions it needs to access WL during the game (you can tab out of the game but not Windows Live within the game). So it wound up taking me about 2 and a half hours from start to final install, because some of the things you need to do are not exactly intuitive and are a pain in the ass to figure out.
But like I said, once you get it going, it is a beautiful game, and runs very smoothly on my card, which is lower end than yours. I would highly recommend you get an xbox 360 controller, the game is very difficult to play with a mouse and keyboard. Although IV doesn’t really add much new to the GTA brand, it is put together pretty well, and they have removed some of the more annoying aspects of previous games (property aquisition, etc). It plays like a composite of previous games, with the addition of some branching storylines (you have to make a few choices here and there). Dating and clothes shopping are back, but toned down from SA. Overall it seems like there’s less collectible and bonus mission stuff (no pizza or ambulance missions, and police and taxi minigames are a lot different). It’s a solid game and will give you your GTA fix, but there’s not much new here.
Unless I’m mistaken. I seem to be able to play GTA IV without signing into live. I just behave very stubbournly when starting the game.
From memory I think it’s a case of finding and clicking the not very obvious ‘play’ button that you can get before you’ve signed in. But I think it signs in anyway.
I don’t think I even gave GTA IV my live details… But I could be wrong about that.
A bit more back on the rails of this thread: Bearing in mind that Nvidia has ‘unified drivers’ what, if anything, do I need to do when I replace my 8800 with the 295? Will it just be a straight swap, and then check settings (such as turn sli on, make sure physx is still switched on, look for any new settings and check they are right)
Or will I need to re-install nvidia’s drivers?
On another note… some apps seem to see my 8800 as two cards (It’s one card and as far as I’m aware it’s only one GPU too)
ETA: Life’s too short (and more important) to be up in arms about having to sign into something in order to play a game. I enjoyed the hell out of FO3 without the signing into live ever being a problem. I dislike DRM in principle (I bought a CD once… when I found that it didn’t work on my PC I got my money back, then downloaded the music for free) but in the case of computer games it has yet to be a bother to me. No, the bother to me about GTA IV is how badly it runs at full spec. And certain aspects of the gameplay.
You can PLAY it without signing into Live, but the impression I got was that you won’t be able to save unless you do so. It said something about having to at least be in onffline mode, so you have to at a minumum install and update Live and possibly have a Live account (but not necessarily sign into it) to get the game to run.
" Life’s too short (and more important) to be up in arms about having to sign into something in order to play a game."
Well the fact that I have to sign into 2 different online services doesn’t bother me that much, or that it sets up to automatically start and sign into both when Windows is loaded. The fact that it took me two and a half hours to install the game is what bothers me. This is the most horrible installation I’ve ever experienced, and I played games when you had to have a different memory setting for every game.
The safest thing to do is to remove the drivers while you have your 9800 installed. Shut down, install your new card, and boot up. then download the latest drivers from nvidia and install them. Technically, yes, the unified drivers will detect your video card, but since it’s a new card, and how know, you might have issues, at least you can write off your drivers as being a possible cause right off the bat.
Me too. (I don’t remember it being any longer than a typical PC game but I probably went and watched TV while I waited)
The Game allows me to save my progress. Just not my stats to live… which is fine.