Fixing the GTAIV stability of framerate with a quadcore CPU

[fluxtras]

Hi there,

I found a personal fix to make the framerate more stable in the game.

I have an Intel Q6600 cpu running at 3,2Ghz (FSB at about 355 so the multiplier still goes to 9).

I found out that after some time.. the game framerate became unstable. I tried some things, but this last effort seems to work for me.

I put the standard affinity on 3 cores, the last 3 (not the first). And put the priority above normal. It is quite hard to figure out how to do this with a commandline, so I use the program Process Lasso. It even has Gaming Mode .

It used to be core1 90% load and core 2,3,4 at about 55-65%...
Now i have core 2,3,4 at about 85-90% continuous load (core1 disabled for the game). It seemed that core1 was bottlenecking the entire game, especially stability. Now my GPU-load is a bit higher and the CPU is more equally stressed (minus core1 of course).


Greetings and good luck getting more stability,


fluxtras

P.S.
If you have a second monitor.. try running the Sensors-tab in GPU-z for your vid.card (or more GPU-z if you have more than one vid.card) and open up the tab Performance in Task Manager and see your cores fight out the load with 4 and 3 cores.

Remember.. Process Lasso (it is free for the first 14 days). Hmm.. just found out it only works without nagging messages for 14 days. After that you get to wait and click OK. Pity... It works pretty good..

note: I already had a stable FPS with my graphics settings adjusted (below VGA.Ram limit) with 4 cores for the BEGINNING of the game.

Just to put my own stuff back up top.

Originally Posted by fluxtras

Yeah, i found alt tabbing working a bit too. However process lasso does a far better working solution for the stability. I found putting it to 3 cores at the start of the game and then switching back to 4 by alt tabbing to process lasso brought the workload more stability to the 4 cores. So in the end you have aproper 4 core functioning game.

Btw i got my fsb @400 now and the multiplier back to 8. Little voltage boost and the ram more in sync to fsb compared to 355 fsb.

Greetings

[Piggus]

Thanks! I have the exact same CPU and overclock as you and was having problems after the latest patch. I'll give this a try. Another temporary fix that worked for me was to simply alt-tab out and then back in again. The framerate issue comes back after about 5 or 10 minutes though.

[fluxtras]

Yeah, i found alt tabbing working a bit too. However process lasso does a far better working solution for the stability. I found putting it to 3 cores at the start of the game and then switching back to 4 by alt tabbing to process lasso brought the workload more stability to the 4 cores. So in the end you have aproper 4 core functioning game.

Btw i got my fsb @400 now and the multiplier back to 8. Little voltage boost and the ram more in sync to fsb compared to 355 fsb.

Greetings

[thenotsogoodtrickster]

This is great as I was going to get a quad core for GTA IV mainly and for any upcoming games, I'm hoping I can do the same sort of thing on my dual core, but a rough guess would tell me no lol

[vivec]

Wow, interesting. I also have that unstable framerate problem after playing for some time. THanks, i'll try it and i'll let you know how it turns out later.

Edit:
HOly CRAP!!! IT WORKS!! Omg, thank you soo much. This software is a must buy for me

[CB]

All this money you spend on a rig. You could have bought a PS3 and a 360 and had no problems whatsoever.

[ZCAB]

Stay on topic.

[fluxtras]

Originally Posted by ChandlerBing

All this money you spend on a rig. You could have bought a PS3 and a 360 and had no problems whatsoever.

Hmm... I played on a PS3 and XBOX360... They suck.. Especially in MPlayer with no mouse and the stupid auto-aim... And the framerate also drops on those consoles, compared to my wonderful rig. Those lame consoles only pull about 24fps or so, my rig normally (if stable) pulls 40+ on average, it is much nicer to watch. Also, the texture def. is higher on the PC. On the consoles it is set to LOW... With my vid.card it is set to MEDIUM, which is much nicer to look at (HIGH is too much for my 512mb vid.ram).

You just keep dwiddleling around with your crappy console, while I rule the internet with mouse and keyboard.

Rockstar should fix the original problem of stability though, crappy programmers/porters. Cya.

[Phil]

Originally Posted by thenotsogoodtrickster

This is great as I was going to get a quad core for GTA IV mainly and for any upcoming games, I'm hoping I can do the same sort of thing on my dual core, but a rough guess would tell me no lol

Well.. if you're gonna get a quadcore anyway, save yourself the time (not wallet friendly though) and get an i7 920.. you wont be having ANY problems running GTA IV with that! trust me..