so you was one of the people who found gta 4 fine on a dual core too?
interesting as i found it to be a laggy mess on faster c2d than any amd x2 and it was only really playable for me with an x3 or quad core.
Once you turned off that stupid game recording feature, and adjusted the settings to medium-low, yeah it played just fine on a dual core and looked awesome compared to the console versions. Heck, they even put out a nice little guide on what the console equivalent settings where. First off the consoles were only rendering at 720p, so since I was able to run it at 1366x768, I was already ahead of the game. Then the consoles had the view distance set to 21 out of a possible 100! I was able to run it at 25. Detail distance on the consoles was only 10! My rig let me run it at 20. Render quality on the consoles was low, I could do medium. It goes on like this for all the settings. Basically my 3 year old dual-core and 2 year old GPU could run GTA IV at higher settings than the consoles. That is pretty impressive. Oh, and the consoles only got 20-30FPS, I was steady over 30.
If you didn't go crazy with the settings, and actually used reasonable settings, the game was playable on some rather low end hardware. But
some people seem to think that if you can't run max settings on shit hardware the game must be an unoptimized crappy port...
oh so you can read and not just look at the posts and make your own version of what it says, i am glad to see that at least...
because you seem to be one of the lucky ones who has not seen the last 500mb of ram issue it does not exist??
does that mean it aint really raining here if the sun is shining on your door too? lol
No, I just don't blame every performance problem on it because it really doesn't cause as much stutter as people say it does.
Again, W1z wouldn't be recommending SLI 970s for 4k at max settings(no MSAA) if there were noticeable stuttering, and if we believe "your friend" stuttering so bad at 1080p that the game isn't playable.
Oh, and if you don't believe W1z, the guys over at
NCIX did a performance analysis too. And you guessed it, they also recommend SLI 970s(or a Titan X) for 4k. Man, you'd think if the 970s and the 0.5GB RAM issue was so bad, either W1z of the guys over at NCIX would have experienced...right...right?!? But "your friend" says his 970s are to blame, so it must be. Definitely no chance of it being some other problem. Those professionals, that deal with graphics card testing FOR A LIVING, have no clue what they're talking about. But "your friend", he's the source we should believe...
seeing as how w1z has already cleared up what settings the tests were ran at, and they were not all the way up it does not shock me to hear it can play the game at high res.
You make it sound like he ran it on low settings. The only settings not maxed out were MSAA(already explained why), Reflection Quality, Grass Quality, and PostFX. And the only one of those that affect memory usage is Reflection Quality, and it doesn't make a big difference(and the visual difference is unnoticeable when playing the game).
And again, he ran it at 4k using almost maxed out settings. Your claiming it is a stuttery mess at 1080p! Even at absolute max settings, even with some MSAA, SLI 970s should be running just fine. As Steevo pointed out, it seems your friend is having other issues.
aint nobody in their right mind going to go out today and pay £600 (less now as they have cut prices since the 500mb-gate) for 2 of these to not be able to run max settings. makes more sense to save £150 and take the 295 as that way you get about the same frames (more at higher res like 4k) and you can turn the setting up to fill all the vram without worry.
The 295x2 has its own set of problems. The first one being, at least here in The States, it is about $50 more than a pair of GTX970s. Sure the 295x2 is about 15% faster at 4k than a pair of GTX970s
if it stays at full speed constantly. Which is can do in an open test bench, but once I put my 295x2 in my case it would throttle after about 15 minutes of gameplay and framerates would drop 10-15FPS. I tried turning the fan around to pull in cool air, and managed to stop it from throttling as quickly, but it still throttled after 30-40 minutes of gameplay, and I don't think the rest of the components in my case were too happy with 500w+ of heat being dumped in the case. Plus when using the 295x2 my room got uncomfortably hot, which hasn't happened since I had my GTX470s...
