Widescreen Gaming Forum

Has anyone been playing with it.

It works in GTA4 but the performance hit at my 5040 resolution is significant. At 1680, it vastly improves image quality in GTA while not taxing the system very much and gets rid of all the damn jaggies but at 5040 its unplayable. Its a shame coz I thought I finally had an anti-aliasing solution for, what I regard as, the best game to show off eyefinity with.

It's weird too coz there are spells at 5040 where it plays quite well up in the 30fps range, but then you turn a corner and it lags out, fps drops to the low teens and then after a few moments it comes back up to the 30's.

I'm on 11.4 previews, I might jump to standard 11.4's to see if they tweaked MLAA a bit.

I read up on it a bit after i got my 6950, and although most claimed that it 's easier on the system than regular MSAA, i haven't found it to be the case.

That's using 11.3 drivers.

Do YOU get the slow stutter in GTA4? I whipped out EFLC and installed it last week, and although it ran amazingly well at my native Eyefinity resolution, I'd get constant waves of slow-down in the animation, not so much the framerates. I tried messing with the much-touted -memrestrict command lines, but nothing made a difference. So back on the shelf it went. I've had it since release day, but have never played through it. First the performance was too horrible on my 5870, now i'ts super-smooth, but wonky on my 6950. Arg.

Nope, no slowdowns, FPS's goes up and down as you'd expect it to, depending on the complexity of what's around me.

I did notice that kind of behaviour with MLAA enabled however. I'd start up the game at 5040, get maybe 11fps and have animation slowmo too, drop the resolution in game to the next lower eyefinity res(38xx x 960 or something), game would jump back to 30fps, then heres the weird thing, I immediately put the res back up to 5040 and the game would no longer be slowmo-ing and lagged out at 11fps. It would be back up over 25fps, stays fine like that for a random length of time as I drove around the city and then suddenly drop back to 11fps and slowmo for no apparent reason.

But to re-iterate my answer to your question, game behaves fine as long as I leave MLAA off.

No my only issues are my old ass q6600 being maxed continually and holding my fps back at the high thirties at best. That and MLAA being weird and moody.

Another question for you, do you have to disable hyperthreading to get that 2600k to clock to 4.6, if thats the case should i buy an i5, cos all I'm doin is gaming, I ain't processing video or utilising any of that hyperthready goodness?

No, i had it running at 4.8 with the Hyperthreading on for a little while since i was doing some encoding (which it helps with greatly) but i noticed that turn the hyperthreading off lowered my max temps almost 10c on every core, and my game benchmarks gained 3fps. And that overlclock is a simple multiplier adjustment. no voltage tweak or anything else. setting it to 4.9 or above gives me BSODs where i have to start fucking with the voltages. Other than temps, disabling HT will allow a slightly higher OC.

But if you don't encode, then the i5 is for you. just be sure to get the K variant. IntelBurnTest tops my hottest core out at 72c after an hour, but anything else tops it out at 64c. Yay for the Noctua cooler, still using voltage reducers on the fans.

As for motherboards, I'm quite pleased with my Gigabyte UD5; it came down to that, or an ASUS P67A. The Gigabyte has Dual BIOS and more USB 3.0 ports, two of which double as eSATA ports.

Oh the 2600k was a huge jump from my previous q9550, which is about par with you q6600.

Another bit of thread necrophilia.

Abram, Got the exact same bug with the slowdowns every half second after I upgraded to sandybridge and 2500k, tried all teh memrestrict commandlines and goat sacrificing etc with no joy. Its the same graphic card and the same 11.10 p3 driver but new cpu, chipset and RAM.

I did solve the slowdowns last night however but at a cost to framerates. I use 1 x 6970 @5040, I set everything to High and put the sliders at 30,30 and 45.

I had tried the refreshrate command line before but it had no real effect, I had it set up at 40 or 50. Last night I gave it one more shot and set it really low at 25 just to be well below my median framerate. And bam, slowdowns totally eliminated. But 25fps wasn't great so I tried ecking it up and got to 28 before the slowdowns started to occur again.

A bit more fiddling with in game settings and I'll probably hit 30. That framerate isn't as bad as it sounds as it a capped framerate and is constant, never going below, so its very smooth, and this thing is a piss poor port as we all know so 30 might be its sweetspot.

I have Ati Tray tools running with the overlay and can see CPU and GPU usage. I'm trying to establish a pattern here and I'm kinda convinced that if my 6970 isn't hitting 100% then I don't get slowdowns and thats where the refreshrate command is helping.

If you still have it installed, try dropping shadows to high and use the refreshrate commandline argument to set it at a lowly 25 and work up from that.

commandline i used...

-refreshrate 28 -frameLimit 1

It would be nice if there was a proper fix for this that doesn't involve frame capping, but I can't see Rockstar ever patching it again. I reckon this is the best I'll ever get it to run and I'm happy enuf as long as it's smooth and 28 is just over the eye detectable threshold and its constant.

I'll probably post a youtube cap at some point and link it.