Well the GFWL and Social Club thingies were a bit of a pain. I spent a little while registering for everything, then some more time preparing my pc with latest drivers, directx, net framework, etc, and then finally installed GTA4.
First I got the MMA10 error but after reading the workaround on gtaforums I fired up GTA4 and it's run fine. Admittedly the graphics options are all towards the low end, which is sorta what I expected from my mid-range system (E8400, 8800GT), but it looks good enough for me.
Love the way the cars bounce and wallow over the bumps and kerbs, and crumple in the right places when you smack into the usual things - street lights, trashcans, people, phone boxes, etc.
Rather annoyed I can't use my joypad for the driving though.
Am I the only one who spotted that this is really stupid?
How can they compare a 8600 with a HD3870?
The HD3850-70 is really really a lot more powerfull than the 8600... You can compare a 8600 with a HD26** but never with a HD38**
Look on the back of the box...they clearly show the nVidia logo, but no ATi stuff. It has also been widely reported that there are problems for ATi users, so it would suggest that the game is better optimised for nVidia than ATi; not that it is as good as it could be on nVidia.
As for the 512 vRAM 'limit', I only have 320, but it still chugs along adequately.. this COULD be because I have a LOT of spare system RAM that may be supplementing this...not sure though.
I'm thinking about restarting my game and running a chess clock to log what proportion of time I actually spend in control of the character and how much is taken up by endless ****ing cutscenes.
So much for securom... It's almost fully cracked, within 2 days Thank you Cockstar for annoying honest buyers. I have yet to check it myself, but ive seen reports of noticable better performance on the cracked version as well
Well... i've got rather uniqe problem. My GTA works TOO BLOODY FAST :P. Motion of every object is at least a couple of times faster than it should be ;p. Great -_-. I've got Radeon HD4870 1GB and Core 2 Duo 3,33Ghz and it works fine on max... around... 30-35fps ^^.
Having had payed for it before I knew it would **** up with ati cards, I downloaded it (on steam) with a bid of a reluctancy. But then I thought, what the heck, it isn't delaying the patch if I try it out now.
And what glee! it runs on my Ati 3850. At a proper 14 average FPS on the automatically set details (1280x1024, so thats my native res, most things on medium, renderer on high). Turning everything down to an absolute minimum only gained me 3 frames per second on average, so I gladly put them up again (allthough the game doesn't look as bad on minimum as I had anticipated). Happily the frame rate is very constant with almost no slow downs, so it's playable well enough to keep me entertained until there's a patch that hopefully boosts ATIs performance.
And lets me run it every time I start it, not every third time ^^. and having to register twice to play it, but then NOT letting me play unless I deactivate one of the registers (the social club one) thus making the gome not fully funtional kind of sucks too.
i kinda like it. The shadows are kinda wierd though. My framerate is around 20-30. Driving is quite fun, only the cam annoys me And i can't even turn it up the highest. It says i exceed the max...
For the ati people, try the 8.12 beta drivers: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=280709
It fixed the crashes for me and gave a huge performance boost. Not blazing fast, but playable at 1680x1050 (hd3850).
Thank you Cockstar for annoying honest buyers. I have yet to check it myself, but ive seen reports of noticable better performance on the cracked version as well 