Nice, thanks.

Well, after installing Rockstar's mandatory Social Club thing, the game won't launch. It ''timed out authenticating with Epic Online Services''. Thank you, Epic, for reminding me why I never buy DRMed releases anymore.

For me it starts, but it takes forever and a day to start up R*'s Social Club crap, once again reinforcing my decision not to buy anything from them since I've got locked out of my legitimately purchased copy of Max Payne 3.

Also reminds me of me not being able to play Far Cry 3 through Ubiplay because their servers are shit (even if only that game may be affected). It was always trying to check online when entering the menu/inventory/etc., but since it couldn't find the servers I had to wait quite long each time before it failed and finally let me continue.

Fuck DRM. I don't give any company a free pass for fucking me over like that, so I simply stop buying any of their games.

Yeah, it launched after a few more tries, but the experience only reinforced my commitment to DRM-free. No way I'm going to have to ''authenticate'' every time I want to play my game, especially if it can fail through no fault on my end. That launcher also made me go through that obnoxious Captcha thing with the pictures.

Not sure if related, but when I ran the game the first time, I think I got the Windows firewall warning "this and this program wants to go online" blaa blaa blaa, so I allowed it. I got a glimpse of that warning and had to Alt-Tab to it I think.

So just suggesting that check your Windows firewall that it doesn't block the game or client to go online. Maybe even disable the firewall for awhile, to test whether the game works.

EDIT: Ok I see this was solved already.

Not sure about Epic, the most likely response is negative, although the game has a benchmark mode with its own fps counter.

Yeah I didn't run the benchmark mode as I wanted to see what the fps is during actual gameplay. Reason being that with GTA IV (Steam version) I got an average framerate of over 60 fps with the benchmark, but the actual framerate in the game dipped under it quite often, sometimes even under 30 fps. So in that sense at least the GTA IV benchmark gave a too optimistic result, not sure if GTA V does too.

Not sure if the Epic version can be run through Steam, or does the game have to be client-free if you want to run it in Steam (where the fps counter is available)? Earlier I used to benchmark The Witcher 3 (GOG version, installed with the standalone installer) by running it through Steam, in order to get the FPS counter.

I've never used FRAPS for this, maybe I should...

Unlikely to ever play it but added it to my account because why not.

Building up quite a good collection of free games on my Epic account :P

GTA V's benchmark was pretty accurate when I tried it. Especially the part with the jet, where my old (like, REALLY old) HDD couldn't load the landscape fast enough *lol*

Nah, honestly. The integrated benchmark tool was indeed pretty accurate. The only thing it didn't show was that the game started to stutter when my RAM was full and the game tried to load stuff from the temp files stored on the HDD. But that only happened after ~half an hour ingame (which the benchmark couldn't simulate) and was easily "fixed" by hitting the pause button and waiting for a few seconds until everything was loaded into the RAM. And as I said: This probably only happened because of my really, really old HDD, which already was slow when using windows.

I decided to update on this (GTA IV performance) because I feel I am getting surprisingly good performance on my other, non-gaming, laptop:

Dell Precision 3530
Intel Core i7-8850H 2.60GHz
NVidia Quadro P600 + Intel UHD Graphics 630
16GB RAM

At 1920x1080 resolution and pretty much everything at either High or Very High, and even View Distance/Detail Distance/Amount of traffic at max, I get 60 fps with vsync on most of the time I drive. Only occasionally it may go to e.g. 50-55 fps, at worst I saw it go to 43 fps when I drove near the water and was looking across a big bridge which lead to the other half of the city, overlooking the city from afar.

This is with the Quadro P600; if I change to Intel UHD, I get lowly 12-16 fps or so. P600 is not really designed for gaming but for more professional use, but it seems to work reasonably with games too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-P600-GPU.302932.0.html

I don't know how much it affects the performance that I had to fix a certain Video RAM problem. For some reason GTA IV seems to think my Nvidia GPU has only 512MB of RAM, hence I couldn't select e.g. high quality textures but only medium. Googling for this, apparently lots of other GTA IV gamers have the same problem, the game doesn't detect the amount of video RAM correctly.

I fixed it with these instructions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2wovQ7is0

For me it was enough to add the following commandline.txt text file into the GTA IV game directory
C:\WinPrg\Steam\steamapps\common\Grand Theft Auto IV\GTAIV\commandline.txt :

-novblank
-norestrictions
-frameLimit 60
-refreshrate 60
-noprecache
-nomemrestrict

I didn't have to add the dinput8.dll like some apparently do. Anyways. after that the game was still reporting the video RAM wrong (512MB), but it allowed me to select high texture quality etc., going over that fake limit.

So yeah, now GTA IV works fine on this non-gaming laptop with pretty much maximum settings, and only occasionally I see the framerate go under 60 fps. So I am unsure if something has recently changed with the game performance-vise (I think it has received a couple of updates this year), or if using the commandline.txt helps with the performance as well, besides fixing the video RAM restriction problem.

At least I am happy with the GTA IV performance now.

Fascinating. I shall give this a try. Thanks!