Input lag in GTA III \ VOGONS

Input lag in GTA III

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First post, by Almoststew1990

Posted on 2017-09-22, 18:55

Almoststew1990 Offline

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Location: Southampton, UK

Hi everyone,

I am trying to play GTA III on the following specs:

P4 2.4GHz
512MB DDR400 RAM @ 333MHz I believe
ECS L8A4S2
Nvidia MX440 32MB on forceware 93 something.
Generic C-Media 8738LX PCI soundcard
fairly modern IDE AOpen DVD drive (audio streaming from CD)
Windows XP

I get a lot of input lag when I am playing this, for both keyboard presses and mouse movements. The delay is about 0.25 to 0.5 of a second so it is unplayable. The framerate is not great, varying between maybe 15 to 30fps depending on what is going on on-screen. What could be causing the issue?
The Mafia demo runs fine (considering the GPU) with no delay in input, and I don't get delay in input around Windows. What could be causing this?

I lowered the res and settings all to minimum (set to 640 x 480x16; it was on 1024 x 768x32 low settings before) and the input lag (and framerate) are much improved. However, I get crazy texture pop in, the textures can't seem to keep up with a moderate speed drive around the city (as in, no road surface will appear at all, I will be driving on an invisible road, buildings appear pretty much flat polygon shaded!) Is this because the harddrive cannot stream the textures to the GPU fast enough, or the GPU can't render them fast enough?

Reply 1 of 4, by leileilol

Posted on 2017-09-23, 00:25

leileilol Offline

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The PC ports of the GTA3 games always have had input lag (and they get pretty bad when trying to aim with the mouse)

However there's also an infamous amount of overdraw on GTA3 where your input lag may be induced further from it (i.e. when it rains or when cars burn). This is more or less fixed in VC and SA

long live PCem

Reply 2 of 4, by weldum

Posted on 2017-09-23, 03:03

weldum Offline

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you should use the old Forceware 45.23 on XP and turn off V-Sync and frame limiter on game, that should make it more playable

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 3 of 4, by havli

Posted on 2017-10-04, 15:01

havli Offline

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Slow texture loading is most likely caused by slow HDD (or HDD controller). Also happens when CPU is not fast enough, but P4 2.4 is more than enough for GTA 3. Make sure your HDD is not damaged, is running in DMA mode and also defragmenting it can't hurt.

GTA 3 is quite heavy on the GPU and GF2 MX or GF4 MX (I'm not sure which one you have) is not that fast. In my tests GF2 MX 400 is doing 25 fps at 800x600x32 and 18 fps at 1024x768x32 full details. GF4 MX 440 SE (64-bit) is running at 35/25 fps and MX 460 56/40 fps.

Disabling the ingame drame sync and also frame limiter should help. Just keep in mind all GTA 3/VC/SA are a little buggy when running at higher fps (noticeable usually at 60+ fps). Physics is affected and in case of GTA 3 also audio is somehow synced to 30 fps and if running >30 fps things people say on the street are not played completely (part of it is cut out). Everything else is fine however.

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Reply 4 of 4, by Osprey

Posted on 2017-10-10, 17:07

Osprey Offline

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Try all of the patches at the following link, as well as the "ddraw component" listed at the top of the "Issues fixed" section.

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_III

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