DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

I’m a big fan of PC gaming. It’s not that I don’t own consoles, in fact, I own all three current generation ones. But I just prefer PC gaming for a couple of reasons. One, the types of games that PC’s are good at, strategy, simulation, are the types of games that I like. Two, the keyboard+mouse combo is much better than a gamepad with first and third person games, including sandbox ones, which are my favourite. Three, I prefer to sit at a desk to play games, than sitting on the floor or on the sofa – now this is just a personal preference, and I can see many (if not most) people preferring the other way. And lastly, PCs are tweakable and you get better graphics, more user modified content and easier access to command line consoles and such to “fix” broken games – see my rant on Fallout 3. Speaking of Fallout 3, I guess this blog entry is pretty much a follow up to that, and it’s all because I was stupid enough to buy yet another copy of GTA IV, this time on the PC (hey, it was on discount, and I just couldn’t resist).

I know I ranted on about the bugs in Fallout 3, but I think I may need to retract a few of my statements there, because compared to, GTA IV, Fallout 3 seems like  military grade level software, stable, bug free and won’t accidentally launch a nuke from time to time. GTA IV, to date, is probably the worst PC game I’ve played to date yet.

Now the game itself is quite excellent, and after finishing it (or nearly) on the Xbox 360, playing through it again on the PC actually somehow made the game better the second time around. The PC controls are better (well, driving aside), with better aiming and shooting. The “Independence FM” feature is excellent, and actually makes driving around tolerable, being able to listen to your own music. Plus all the reasons I’ve mentioned up top as to why I prefer PC gaming over consoles. But it’s the actual programming that’s the problem: GTA IV on the PC simply doesn’t work most of the time.

This is an actual in-game screenshot from my game, moments before a crash occurred

Now, I’ve only recently got the game so I don’t know what it was like before the latest round of patching. I’ve read on some forums that suggest the older patches were better, and that the newer patches made things worse. Which is exactly the sort of thing that I touched upon in my Fallout 3 rant. But the problem goes further. At least with Fallout 3, there are workarounds which allowed you to at least play the game for an hour or two at a time. With GTA IV, and the latest 1.0.4.0 patch, you’re lucky to be able to get more than 20 minutes. The problem I have is that it will stutter (screen turns black, sound freezes, and then after about 10 seconds, everything is back to normal – repeat this every minute or so) and then freeze completely, requiring a shutdown through Task Manager. The problem happens randomly, and it can happen when your computer has been on for a day, or when it has just been booted into Windows. And even when the game is working, and just like on the console versions, the framerate isn’t very consistent and it’s certainly not smooth in the way Fallout 3 is smooth (unsteady framerates probably). But I can forgive Rockstar Games for this, since they’ve never been really good at this sort of thing going back to GTA III, which had ultra fast framerate on modern PCs unless you tweaked around with the settings, and GTA: SA, which still doesn’t give me smooth Fallout 3 type framerates on my C2D E8500 with ATi Radeon 4850 and 4 GBs of RAM. These things I can forgive, as long as you let me play the great game for more than 20 minutes at a time. The in-game benchmark gives me 50+ FPS, but the uneven framerate problem can’t really be shown in benchmarks like this which only shows the average framerate (so if the framerate was 1 FPS for half of the time, and 100 FPS for the rest, then the average is still 50 FPS).

And it’s not even a problem that Rockstar are unaware of – they even published the full list of error codes. I think the error I get is either the DD3D10 or the DD3D30 one, sometimes the RESC10 one as well, and the only way to run the game again is to reboot the computer. Now I’m aware that GTA IV is a complex game, more so than Fallout 3, which is kind of sparse in terms of objects (fits well into the nuclear wasteland scenario, though). But a C2D E8500, Radeon 4850 and 4 GBs of DDR3 RAM (in XP), should at least let me play for more than 20 minutes at a time. And the game definitely gets worse the more you play, and you get access to more islands. So I didn’t experience crashing until about a third way through the game, unlike others whose games crashed much earlier than that. It seems there’s a memory leak somewhere, but who knows.

But after extensive tweaking, I’ve been able to play for an hour at a time, not always, but a few times already. A lot of testing and tweaking was needed, and I’ve really just been testing things randomly really, but some of it might have worked. So I thought I would share some of the things I tried here. Now not all of them has worked, and I still get crashes often, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. So test them out yourselves, and hopefully, you’ll get to play the game for more than 20 minutes at a time. I won’t go through the more obvious things like closing down all non essential programs (I found closing down MSN Messenger made things a lot more stable), installing the latest drivers (or rolling back to drivers that allowed you to have a better GTA IV experience before), unrolling any overclocking you may be doing, and ensuring your memory isn’t broken by running memtest or your CPU is stable by running Prime95. Also, turn off the clip capture setting in the in-game menus, as that just consumes more resources and causes crashes faster. For the in-game resolution, try to use one with 75 Hz output, which seems to make the game run smoother, at least on my system.

Tip #1: Using command-line switches

GTA IV on the PC supports several command line switches that can be used to affect the game’s settings, some of them not available from the options section within the game. To use command line switches, first start the notepad program in Windows, from the File menu, select “Save As” and then navigate to the folder in which GTA IV is installed (by default, it should be “C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV”). When saving, make sure the “Save as type” setting is selected as “Text Documents (.txt)”, and then name the file “commandline”. So basically, you should now have a blank text file called “commandline” in your GTA IV folder (the same folder as the files “LaunchGTAIV”, “gta4Browser” …). Now that this file has been created, we’ll add several command line switches to it to use within GTA IV.

Tip #2: Adding the command-line switches

The switches that I have added to my commandline text file are as follows:

-fullspecaudio
-memrestrict 262144000
-windowed

The first one enables full spec audio, which unsets limits to the framerate and makes the game stutter more. This is to improve the framerate experience, but I’m not sure it has any effect on stability. Some have suggested trying -minspecaudio instead.

The second one, memrestrict, is something that the Rockstar tech support have recommend (thanks for the tip, but how about actually fixing the game, as opposed to workarounds?). The exact setting (the number following the switch) depends on your game settings, so have a look at this thread for information on which setting you need to use.

The third one enables windowed gaming mode, which gives you an ugly border around the game, but at least it makes using Task Manager to shut down the GTAIV.exe process (as opposed to a reboot) much easier when the games does indeed freeze. It also, at least on my system, seems to cause less freezing and crashes.

There are a bunch of other command line switches you can try, but some I found made things worse, rather than better.

Tip #3: Underclock your GPU

One theory is that GTA IV pushes your GPU to the limit and causes it (or the device drivers) to crash. It’s a programming error if this happens, but one that Rockstar either haven’t identified or aren’t able to fix right now. And even if it isn’t a programming thing, then people with computers that have poor ventilation or underpowered fans will also experience this as GTA IV uses 100% of your GPU for an extended period. You can underclock your GPU in many ways, but I use the software RivaTuner. Start the tool, under the “Main” tab, look for the drop down list that list your GPU/monitor combo, and just under that, to the right, there is a button you can click on next to the word “Customize …” click on that and click on the first icon in the pop-up. Check the “Enable low-level hardware overclocking” checkbox, you may need to reboot your PC if you’ve been using it for a while or have been overclocking before. Then, from the default clock position, move the slider to the left (lower clock), and lower the speed by 10 or 20 MHz. Press “Apply” to apply the changes. You can save the profile and create a shortcut so you don’t have to go through this every time, but I don’t mind doing it manually. This trick seems to work better on ATi cards, especially the newer Radeons, as they have dynamic underclocking (for example, my 4850 switches between 500 and 625 MHz, depending on usage), and this constant change might be one of the many reasons why GTA IV crashes.

Tip #4: Nvidia Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames

For Nvidia card users, there is also another thing they can try to boost framerates and/or reduce crashes. I don’t have an Nvidia card, so I can’t test it, but others have had success. This is a setting you’ll find in your Nvidia drivers, under “Managed 3D settings” I think (see screenshot) – set “Maximum pre-rendered frames” to “1” for the application “LaunchGTAIV.exe”. See this thread for more information. But other threads show that increasing this setting reduces the burden on the GPU (at the expense of the CPU), but might help with crashing. Something worth trying for Nvidia owners, I suppose.

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I’m sure there are many other tips and tricks, some will work, some won’t, but with the above, I’ve at least been able to play the game for more than 20 minutes, and sometimes for up to an hour before the freezing starts again. And with the windowed mode, I can shutdown the GTAIV.exe process using Task Manager, and sometimes I won’t even need to restart Windows to play again. Suffice to say, the “auto-save” feature of GTA IV becomes increasingly useful, as trying to get back to a safehouse before the game crashes isn’t the type of suspense I was expecting from the game (though it is sometimes quite exciting).

So anyway, great game, bad implementation, worse patches. Just one of the many PC games that do this (Test Drive Unlimited is the other one that I’ve had a lot of problems with), and companies wonder why PC gaming is dying. But not all games are bad, some will work for hours on end without breaking a sweat. Call of Duty 4/World At War, World In Conflict,  Stardock’s Sins of a Solar Empire (at 1080p, full details, hundreds of ships in battle at the same time – no crashes!), Company of Heroes, Far Cry 2, Crysis – are just some of the games that don’t cause this type of headaches for their users, despite some of them being more CPU and GPU intensive. So it is possible, game developers, to make PC games that don’t crash. It’s not easy, given so many different configurations, but it is possible.

For now, it’s back to GTA IV, Task Manager, and reboots for me, all the time praying for a new patch that solves at least some of the problems. Well, at least I didn’t pay full price for the game (thanks to cdwow.com.au’s discount offer).

Update:

Having tried some more things, what I suggest is that at first, you only try the “windowed” command line and see how that works out. Also, make sure you close all other running programs, including any browser windows you may have open. Basically anything requiring a bit of memory or graphics memory should be closed, as it could lead to out of memory errors. And finally, if the game freezes on you (the sound may freeze or go on), don’t hit the reset button just yet – wait a bit and it will usually bounce back, at which point you can do a normal shutdown of the game, or in some cases, continue playing (I’ve often found that the game somehow becomes more stable after the first freeze, and after that, I can play for an hour without it crashing again).

Update #2:

ATI has released a new set of Catalyst drivers (9.8), which are official and stable, but not yet on their main websites (it’s posted on their blog). Some have experienced less crashes with this new driver, with sometimes better FPS as well. I’ve tried it, but only for a short while, and I haven’t noticed any positive differences. In fact, FPS seems to be a little lower, and I’ve already had the freezing problem. You may have better luck though, so try it out, and if it fails, then uninstall the driver using add/remove programs, then use Driver Sweeper to fully clean up the drivers, and finally re-install whatever drivers you were using before.