GTA IV: 9700k @ 5050Mhz. and two cores pinned

I really don't understand how GTAIV could use 100% of two cores of a 9700k at 5 Ghz. All the sliders are maxed and I did alter the draw distances even further, but still the game is from 2008!

What are you exact settings. I will see if I can mimic.
I have a 9700k I can downclock to 5Ghz and see.
IIRC this game runs better in windowed mode for non-ht cpus

But how do you get windowed mode? There's no graphics option for widowed mode?

Aside from having all sliders maxed and definition set to 'on' I modified stream.ini to use more memory (up to 8 GiB, which it seemingly never uses).

I've also modified visualsettings.dat by:

1. changing the car.lod.distance.high from the default of 20.00 to 30.00 and car.lod.distance.low to 100.0 from 80.00 for 1080Ti

2. changed misc.Multiplier.farClipMultiplier to 3 (this changes the view distance)
The default value is 2. When I set it to 1, it looks like the FarClip is reduced to 250.00 (my FarClip values in the timecyc.dat is 500.00).
So basically it's an alternative, rather than replacing all FarClip values in the timecyc.dat it's easier to put a simple multiplier for it in the visualsettings.dat.

It could be that GTAIV is heavily thrashing system memory and maybe not only at a problematic area on Union Dr. East heading S. right before you
head under the Algonquin Bridge. Here the game always drops to 49 FPS at night and only at night. GTAIV only ever uses 2 GiB of system RAM (maybe
because it was designed to work on Windows XP).

Thx bhsmurfy

Good ole GTA4 among the most poorly coded games of all time lol, haven't tried it on my 9900K but on 7980XE @ 4.3 it would do the same thing, peg 1-2 cores at 100%. Hence a "CPU limited" game, it was only designed to use 2-4 cores. Even more fun with 10gb of mods lol... back in the day used to play it on quad 4870x2, imagine the stutter

GTA IV was programmed to work on Windows XP 32-bit and maybe the limitations of that OS (<4 GiB max system memory, 2 GiB address space for programs) and DX9 are among what the problems are w/GTAIV. Quad core CPU's came out in 2006 so you would figure they would at least utilize 4 cores or maybe three (because that's what the Xbox 360 had).

If GTA IV was thrashing system memory (e.g. constantly pre-loading in textures into its limited address space) wouldn't that reduce CPU usage because the CPU would be waiting for memory transactions to complete?

I finished a play through earlier this year and it used 3 threads (which Google also supports) so if it's only loading two then you've got something else going on.

The game won't run well regardless, vanilla graphics only with a lighting fix (to get rid of the ugly brown hue on everything) @ 1440p max settings I still dipped into the 40s on the bridges between the cities and after I finally added a graphics mod it only got worse.

When I was in the actual city it stayed around 60-80 but the bridges tanked FPS.

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32 bit game, can't really allocate more than 4GiB of anything.

The Pook, was GTA IV pinning three of the cores on your 9900K? Were the cores involved all real cores (i.e. not hyperthread cores)?

I don't think I've seen any game max out two cores on any CPU I've owned since my Pentium D on LGA775.

unless you're using a Phenom X3 720 or something it shouldn't pin 3 cores to 100% and the Windows Scheduler shouldn't assign a task to a thread unless whatever being assigned wouldn't saturate a thread. 1903 even had a massive update to the scheduler for that IIRC, but with a 9700K so that's not your problem anyway.

people were playing GTA IV in 2008 fine (well, at 30 FPS) with a Q6600 and a 7800/8800/9800 GTX. It was optimized poorly but you could still brute force it into being playable.

I played with a Q9550 @ 4 ghz and quad 4870x2 at 2560x1600, quite a system workout lol. And 30 fps was about right. Can't believe that was 10 years ago, feels like yesterday. I think it puts more emphasis on the main 2 cores/threads. Even on a modern system, it will "pin" two cores to 100% and that will pretty much determine frame rate. Additional cores are used, but the Windows thread scheduler seems to distribute those more evenly.