Gta IV 20 fps problem --> i5 3570k @ 4.0

I have a:
i5 3570k @ OC'ed from 3.4 to 4.0 GHz
XFX 7950 (not OC'ed)
8 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 GSkill
ASRock Z77 Pro4 Motherboard

and i am getting anywhere from 20-30 Fps on Gta IV ( ON MEDIUM/HIGH GRAPHICS...) shouldnt i be getting better with this setup?
I get Non-stop 60 Fps on Skyrim on max and stuff but im getting 20-30 Fps on medium/high on gta 4...

GTA4 was very poorly optimized for the PC and for whatever reason it is even worse on AMD cards from what I remember.

Are you using a real copy of GTA4? I know that in later patches they improved it.

My set up runs the game very smoothly and it's an older system. Make sure you have the latest patch and latest GPU drivers.

I was literally about to make a similar thread, but not with the same hardware, and I sort of "fixed" the problem even though I don't know what's going on. Can you run some program to monitor your CPU usage and GPU usage while you play and just alt-tab out of the game to see if anything is bottlenecking?

The issue I had was I overclocked my CPU to 4.6GHz stable, and then I had to turn the game settings down to med/high because I was getting framerate drops down to the lower 20's or more, depending on the circumstance. However, I dropped my OC back down to 4.2GHz and the game runs absolutely fine on maxed out settings at 40+ FPS

I used a CPU usage gadget on my desktop and GPUz to monitor my CPU and GPU usages, and here's the strange part that I really can't figure out: At 4.2GHz, nothing seems to be bottlenecking and so the game performs flawlessly at maxed out settings; At 4.6 GHz the GPU is bottlenecking at 100% while the CPU still has room to spare. So, I guess that's more of a reason to run a slower overclock... at least in my case.

EDIT:ALMOST maxed out settings. (high/very high)

Janus67 said:

GTA4 was very poorly optimized for the PC and for whatever reason it is even worse on AMD cards from what I remember.

Click to expand...

The only problem I had with my AMD card is the "ATI water bug" which was easily fixed after a quick Google search. It was never fixed with any patches, but you have to replace the water texture files with some modified files otherwise the water texture doesn't load and it looks almost as smooth as glass. After replacing those files (as well as the aforementioned "fix") my game runs fine on an AMD box.

What are you two using to measure framerate? I have found in the games that the benchmark isn't even close to what Fraps says.

I'm using FRAPS.