I bought this game today and was shocked at the feeble default settings and lack of freedom to set my own desired options, which left me with an 800x600 image that looked like crap and struggled along at 20fps.
After a few hrs testing i now have it running about 80% of the performance of an X360 using a mid range macbook pro.
I have already found a great tweak trick to increase textures without performance hit or other restrictions!!!
This enables better quality on mid range machines with 256mb of GFX memory and should work on other more powerful cards.
Please read the following for details on how to do this!
Firstly!
A low end machine will by default settings not allow you to raise your resolution above 800x600. This is DOES NOT mean you cannot increase your resolution!
By default the game use a calclator to assess what how much memory we are using with just the 3 following options -
resolution
texture quality
view distance
If you lower or raise these settings the memory usage at the bottom will go up or down. If you go over your GFX memory the game flashes up a warning message and allows about 10-15% (as far as i can tell) extra allocation for more of the 3 values.
When you hit the ceiling you are unable to increase those settings at all, they will simply refuse to move. I initially mistook this as a limit for my machine, but if you reduce one or both of the other 2 values you can free up memory and increase the jammed one.
So if i want to raise my resolution, i need to reduce my texture size or view distance until the memory value turns green (indicating excess resources).
Ok so here is my clever tweak -
Since even modest graphics cards can run decent texture levels with even 256mb of memory, even a basic machine can run medium textures (possibly even high) with NO peformance hit.
However since the game refuses to let you choose your own settings you have to 'spend' memory to get the medium textures.
This means you have to have less draw distance or lower resolution, which really kills the experience. However i found a cunning way to get medium textures by fiddling the settings.
You need to set the game options initially to medium or high textures, and not worry about resolution and your view distance. Just set them as low as you can so you can spend all your memory on getting the textures as high as your machine will allow.
A 512mb card might be able to get high textures since you can spend over 512... so try it and dont forget to use fraps to check your frame rates before and after.
Now you have the game set at your desired texture level, start a game (making sure to restart GTA 4 if necessary to load new textures) then once in game go to the graphics menu and switch the textures to LOW!
The game will 'refund' you back the memory you spent on textures, but the textures wont revert back until you restart the game. This means you can now increase your resolution to a nice sharp level, and then add view distance (i recommend certainly NO LESS than 10 or it really looks screwed up).
If you check with fraps you will see no detectable decrease in frame rate, but you now have decent textures along with your original resolution and view distance combination.
Rockstar needs to seriously patch the menus, since even my 8600m GT can run ultra textures on all other games with no difference to lowest. Textures have such little impact on overall performance, it makes no sense to force such cards to use the lowest settings.
This arbitrary system of calculating memory does not represent real game performance!
See for yourselves!
My specs -
Macbook Pro 2.4ghz (santa rosa), 2GB ram, 8600m GT 256mb.
Graphics settings
Resolution - 1176x664 (pretty sharp, just a snip away from the X360)
textures - (set as MEDIUM and reduced to low without restarting)
rendering quality - medium (no real gain from high at this resolution)
View distance - 10 (can push to 17, but eats about 5fps for minor view improvement)
detail distance - 10 (same as X360)
traffic density - 28 (default)
shadow density - 0 (see end of post!)
This all runs between 18-26fps, which is playable and looks pretty decent for a laptop.
More powerful machines could easily hit 30fps and id recommend getting the resolution to 1280x720 and then work on increasing view distance.
I couldnt seem to find any visual or perfomance impact for shadow density, i havent yet tested it at 0 and 16 with a restart. But altering it makes no difference to the quality or number of shadows, nor does it seem to affect frame rate. If anyone figures ths is out please post details.
...ima li neka nova slika PS3 pakovanja ili nesto...
