Missing Textures Issue

[JustinL]

If you are experiencing an issue where textures are not visible, the following instructions may solve the issue.

This issue can occur if your video drivers are incorrectly installed or have become corrupt.

These instructions explain how to completely remove all existing driver files and are recommended for advanced computer users only.

These instructions recommend using a third party application called Driver Sweeper, which was not developed by Valve and therefore we provide no support or guarantee regarding its use.

Please proceed at your own risk.

1. Uninstall your existing video drivers from the Add/Remove Programs window.

Click Start, then Run (or Windows Key + R) and type in the following command:

appwiz.cpl

Locate and uninstall your video drivers (They should be listed alphabetically under Nvidia or ATI)

2. Download and install the free driver removal utility call Driver Sweeper, available at the following URL:

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

3. Restart your computer in Safe Mode. This can be accomplished by tapping the F8 key while your computer is booting up. A list should appear with Safe Mode as an option.

4. Launch Driver Sweeper (It should be located on your start menu where you installed it previously)

There will be checkboxes for "ATI - Display" and "NVIDIA - Display". Check both of these and click "Clean"

If you receive errors, please note exactly what they are.

It is recommended to repeat the cleaning process a few times to make sure all files are properly removed.

5. Restart your computer in normal mode (This should happen automatically. Pressing F8 again is not required)

You may notice some graphical irregularities (Items being larger than usual, and etc). This is normal.

Run Driver Sweeper one more time from normal mode to ensure that all driver files are removed.

6. Download and install the latest video drivers for your video card.

Nvidia Desktop Drivers - http://www.nvidia.com

ATI Desktop Drivers - http://www.ati.com

Notebook drivers should be obtained from your notebook manufacturer's website.

7. Restart your computer once the drivers are installed.

8. Launch the game and re-test the issue.

9. If the issue is still not resolved, some users have found that the issue was only resolved after downloading Riva Tuner (A third party graphics card tweaking tool) and doing the following:

- Launch Riva Tuner
- On the main tab, click the arrow to the right of "ForceWare detected"
- Click on the broom icon (last icon on the right). This will reset all graphics driver settings to their default values.
- Click OK and restart your computer.
- Test the game.

As with Driver Sweeper, Riva Tuner was not developed by Valve and we do not offer any support or guarantee of its use.

Riva Tuner is available here:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download737.html

Also, some Vista users have found that toggling the Superfetch service on or off may alleviate problems with this game, including the missing texture issue. The amount of memory available in your system may affect which setting is appropriate for your computer. However, if you are experiencing problems running Grand Theft Auto IV, try turning this service off. If this service is typically disabled on your system, try turning it on.

To enable/disable this service, do the following:
- Click Start>Run (Windows Key + R) and type in "services.msc"
- Locate "Superfetch" in the list
- Right click on the service and choose "properties"
- Under "Startup type", choose "disabled" (or choose "Automatic" if the service is currently disabled) and hit Apply.
- Restart your computer.
- Test the game again.

[paxton666]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"There appears to be two seperate issues with nvidia cards, that manifest themselves into the same sort of rendering defects.

The first is immediately having texturing problems upon loading the game. This seems to be fixable for many by cleaning and installing newer drivers.

The second is an accumulative problem, where over time (or rather, travel distance) more and more of the world has texturing problems,first lower resolution textures are used, and eventualy no textures at all for much of the world"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Above is a Quote from user Dustmonkey.



READ ON FOR ANSWER TO SECOND ISSUE!



I have discovered the answer to the second problem. While playing the game, I noticed that my hardrive was always spinning. This led me to believe that my pagefile was being used. Sure enough, I was out of RAM. My system has 2G of RAM. With my current settings on the Graphics page it says the game will use 800/1100. That means only 800M out of 1100M available. Task Manager has me pegged at 2G with the game minimized.

To confirm this is the problem. I tweaked my settings until my RAM did not go above 2G.

The following settings work for me. They fix my missing texture issue.

medium
highest
1
1
1
0

This means all slider bars to the left. This leaves me with 300/1100. Which actually puts me at 1.87G usage in task manager with the game minimized. I started with 400M usage before loading game. So the game is actually using 1.47G when the graphics settings say only 300M.

I have 3 GTX 280 in TRIPLE SLI, 2G RAM, 3.33Ghz Dual core OC to 4GhZ processor. I have to play with sliders all the way to the left.

Atleast I can drive all over the city without missing textures.

Hope this helps.


Brian

P.S. All I have to ♥♥♥♥♥ about now is what a memory hog this game is. I ordered 2G more RAM to bring me to 4G. I hope that is enough to increase my graphics settings a little more.

MODERATOR PLEASE ADD TO YOUR STICKY

[CardnalStryker]

Rockstar is the problem, his rig should have no problem at all running this game. Please rockstar update your ♥♥♥♥

[Freyar]

I'm hoping he has SLI disabled.

[paxton666]

As far as I can tell, SLI ON/OFF has no impact on performance or texture missing issue.

Now I changed all my settings to lowest possible.

low
low
1
1
1
0

Task Manager shows 1.7G usage. Also, the RAM usage eventually goes over 2G after driving around. When this happens the texture issue comes back :(.

At these settings the game graphics are much worse than the 360 version.

[warlordkn]

so paxton is this fixed or not
i too have the loss of textures over time
it seems like a mem leak and as you said you hdd was running nonstop.

but now in your latest post you are saying that you switched to low/low, is this to assume that eaventually the problem still persisted, just took longer?

[cwsault]

Just a note, if you are using a laptop/notebook and need to update NVIDIA drivers, use www.laptopvideo2go.com. Many laptop NVIDIA cards are not included in the list of cards the driver setup program will install with, and require the laptop vendor to do their own version of the drivers. From LaptopVideo2Go you can download both the latest drivers, plus a modded version of a file to replace in the installer directory that lets them install with laptop video cards.

[paxton666]

Yes warlord. The problem persisted over time. I guess we have to wait for nvidia and rockstar to get it together.

[Noil]

The first time I played GTA 4 everything was fine.
But today, I try to play again, and textures are missing !

I uninstall, clean and install again driver.
Nothing change (and it's quite normal, how can it play well yesterday and today appears missing texture ?)

I try the second option, but game do not save graphic change !

I will try to uninstall game and install again. Although I know nothing will change !

[haon8]

Does anybody know if this will work with the FILL IN issue, not just missing textures?

[djatmos]

Im not an advanced user. How am i supposed to get this thing to work?
Isent NVIDIA and Rockstar supposed to work this out and just hand us a patch or something? This is so damn annoying, been waiting for a long time for this.

[ColeusRattus]

yeah, they have the patch that solves all the issues somewhere at rockstar and just forgot to release it until now...

Seriosuly, I bet they are working on it and will give us the patch as soon as it's ready.

[matutano]

I got 1gb... mininum required to play and this bug, so i will never get it working? It's kinda stupid...

[WILDCORE]

Yes warlord. The problem persisted over time. I guess we have to wait for nvidia and rockstar to get it together.

Same here. But I have 4GB RAM and one HD 3870x2. After at least 2h of game play the textures are gone. I can not even find the door to my apartment to save the game :(

So I guess nVidia, ATI and R* did something wrong or only R*

[thaCURSEDpie]

Same here. But I have 4GB RAM and one HD 3870x2. After at least 2h of game play the textures are gone. I can not even find the door to my apartment to save the game :(

So I guess nVidia, ATI and R* did something wrong or only R*

Same here, I have 3GB of DDR2 ram and a 8800GTS 320MB.
It gets worse overtime, and it totally DIFFERENT to the issue where there's not textures at all... I'm gonna mail Rockstar about this.

[thaCURSEDpie]

Look here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=763044

It worked for me!!! :D :D

[WILDCORE]

Look here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=763044

It worked for me!!! :D :D

Does not work for me.

I observed that waiting for one or two minutes brings all textures back. I found out browsing through my LIVE achievements while in game and after closing LIVE everything faded in.

[CosmicD]

hehe, in dutch we have a saying 'choosing eggs for your money", I just guess I'll go on playing left for dead untill that gta issue is over.

I tried to clean sweeap the drivers, reinstall the latest stable version and there's no effect. The bad thing is that even when riva tuner asks driver signing to be disabled and after the system is rebooted, i can't even start that thing properly as well.

One can only waste time circunmventing a bug for so long :P

[Cobaltred]

I am still getting the second missing texture bug described, the accumulating over time one. This bug only appears when I turn up the resolution and texture settings using the -norestrictions command line, but I feel I have to do this because the game runs smoother and high res & texture setting than at lower settings! (~27 FPS on high 1920x1200, ~18 FPS on high at 1440x900).

When at these high settings the game says I'm over my max video memory so you might think that's why I get the texture pop problem. The wierd thing is when I set my available vidmem to 512 using the command line (what the HD 4850 has) my available vid memory max in the in-game graphics menu doubles to 1048! Strangely, this gets rid of the texture pop problem but drops the framerate to ~14 FPS!

My system (nothing OC'ed)

Q6600
Radeon 4850
4 GB Corsair RAM

Using the following command line: -nomemrestrict -norestrictions -novblank -texturequality 2 -percentvidmem 100

Edit: I should mention I have tried the driver roll back to both 8.11 and 8.12 (which has much better performance) and it has had no effect on the above problem.

[WILDCORE]

It tells you 1048 instead of 512 cause you you used -nomemrestrict. This allows the game to not only use the VRAM, but also the RAM for texture storage.
It seems the game just fills the available memory with textures without deleting them or doing it too slow. After a while it simply runs out of memory and we get that "Poor Matrix" look.
The higher the texture resolution is the fast you will get it. Depends also on being in the same area in Liberty City or rushing from east to west.
Loading the last save game will bring everything back, but this bug will now occur much faster.

Best thing is just to restart the game.

I got also this starting bug.

In all it is very disappointing and annoying.

[paxton666]

Everybody

Read this article on IGN. It is Q & A about these issues.

Mostly, I don't like what Rockstar is saying.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/936/936304p1.html

[DustyMonkey]

Everybody

Read this article on IGN. It is Q & A about these issues.

Mostly, I don't like what Rockstar is saying.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/936/936304p1.html

I don't like what they are saying either.

Apparently when I set all the setting to minimum, I am setting them too high. Its my fault, not theirs.

Thats what this bull♥♥♥♥ter is claiming, that its my fault that after 10 minutes of travel in the game it can no longer load up its lowest resolution textures, not even a 1x1 mipmap.

Bull♥♥♥♥.

[don567]

I was getting a problem with my HDD thrashing all the time when I was driving, but I managed to fix that by turning off superfetch in Windows Vista. Now that I've done that, I get little or no hard drive thrashing. But now I have the second texture issue. Anyway I can fix this without making my hard drive thrash constantly?

[CosmicD]

Well I got rid of the persistent missing graphics problem, thx for the tip to put superfetch on again, that remedied my situation.

So I also tried to experiment further with all settings on high with a res of 1360x768 and then I get graphic popups and missing graphics.

But when I set high detail textures, long distance renderign etc: but use 840x448 : the game runs just fine actually without any problem.

so for me, the prob is solved. I don't even see the high graphics detail being 'that' much higher and my computer actually doesn't freeze anymore on high resolution when I have superfetch on (which it was severely doing yesterday when I tested high resolution without superfetch service enabled).

Sof if I would just have a graphics card that had 1 gb, for some $300: it runs fine, actually because the video memory is larger (but the processing power of my q6660 seems to be good enough).

So what we just have against us is the "streaming" nature of a big city that needs big video memory to be constantly updated ?

[bnlgoi]

The game was working somewhat fine for a few hours, when suddenly I started to get this. I've tried all the fixes here three times, and the damn textures still disappear after a few minutes. I'm using a HD4870 512mb, everything on low, though I have my resolution at 1280x1024, might be that, but why it would happen so sudden, when I've managed to play it before, is what I'm wondering about.

EDIT
Tried changing resolution, nothing different.
Also, when they start disappearing the phone won't work properly, and guns won't work properly.

[Ben Affleck]

I had a look at the services I had running after hearing mention of someone causing texture drop out by turning off superfetch; I turned mine back on and viola.. Not much but if you've tried all the driver re-installing etc, then this is probably worth checking. Also I don't know but AMD Fusion might turn off Superfetch so if you're troubleshooting, I'd leave it alone for now.

I waited TWO DAYS to figure that out.

For anyone unfamiliar with this stuff:
Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services
then scroll to superfetch. I'm sure you can figure it out from there.

My PC:
Shuttle SN25P
Amd 4600X2 Socket 939
2GB RAM
Sapphire Radeon 4870 512MB
2 Disk Striped SATA RAID
Vista 64

[paxton666]

Yeah, turning the superfetch service(on by default in Vista) back on fixed my missing textures over time issue.

I am very glad that I can play the game now.

Brian

[synx]

I've had superfetch off since day 1 of installing the OS. Guess I'll try enabling it for ♥♥♥♥s and giggles to see if it fixes this crap.

[lawina]

The only fix for me was to buy additional ram and yes i tryed every tip/fix on this forum and nothing helped. I had 2GB ram and now i have 4GB and have no problems with textures dissappearing anymore.

[venom4911]

Yeah, turning the superfetch service(on by default in Vista) back on fixed my missing textures over time issue.

I am very glad that I can play the game now.

Brian

same here! after turning it back on and rebooting i just played for 30-40 min and had not one blurry/missing texture in sight...no objects popping up in front of me either

/happy

[arslock]

weird. just happened to me for the first time after i updated graphics drivers. i just quit the game and restarted and it was fine. hopefully it won't happen again.

[sideways83]

hi....
I have problem on the shadows....is like this guy
http://picasaweb.google.com/TheGooch69/FRAPSCaptured#
problem in shadow
have some way of fix that?

thanks

[WILDCORE]

Yeah, turning the superfetch service(on by default in Vista) back on fixed my missing textures over time issue.

I am very glad that I can play the game now.

Brian

I turned it back on and it helped me, but fixed it not. The textures are now reloading in one second or less, not in minutes like before. Thanks!

[ufoun]

i have also superfetch off, have not yet tried to turn it back on. It's annoying service. Anyway, after a couple of hours of playing the textures start to vanish. It's increasingly worse and worse until almost everything is transparent :). What I have found out is that it's memory consumption causing the problem. The gta4.exe is shown as eating approx 1.2G ram but whole 4G seems to be "eaten" somehow (task manager shows full bar at 3.98G). If I restart the game, the ram consumption is back to normal. This gives me couple of more hours to play until it's all eaten again...

[NyHoK]

i have also superfetch off, have not yet tried to turn it back on. It's annoying service. Anyway, after a couple of hours of playing the textures start to vanish. It's increasingly worse and worse until almost everything is transparent :). What I have found out is that it's memory consumption causing the problem. The gta4.exe is shown as eating approx 1.2G ram but whole 4G seems to be "eaten" somehow (task manager shows full bar at 3.98G). If I restart the game, the ram consumption is back to normal. This gives me couple of more hours to play until it's all eaten again...

Trust me I turned off Superfetch based on someones advice on these forum and the missing texture problem started. I spent ages on trying to fix it thinking it was not my fault however, when I turned superfetch back on the textures stopped dissappearing. There is hardly a performance decrease with superfetch on so try it and see for yourself. :D

[Drumdevil]

I have got the missing textures problem too, from time to time. Changing the resolution of the game when the problem occurs works for me.

[Nebby_99]

I can confirm that setting the Superfetch service to auto startup and rebooting fixed the problem for me (the first reboot after setting it coincided with my switching video cards, which confused me).

Disabling it and rebooting again caused the problem to come back. Then I set it back to auto, rebooted again and it's fixed again. So I'm pretty sure that SuperFetch is the issue in my case.

Unfortunately the disk activity is crazy and I get 0.5-10 FPS on the lowest settings at 1280x800 with my system:
C2D E6600
9800GT 512MB
1GB RAM (more on the way!)
Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9

[arturchix]

Are the textures really supposed to weight ONLY 32.8 MB? Maybe this why lots of users have missing textures problem because they weren't installed properly in the first place.

[phuzman]

i have an x1900 xtx and im getting the missing textures...

[Shadow801]

:YOU PEOPLE ALL HAVE SUPERFETCH! Us XP users don't!!! :mad: US XP USERS NEED A FIX.

[XRStatic]

Until rockstar/microshaft releases a fix I have found something finally to 'help' with the issue. It's not prety and is super annoying, but at least I can see textures 80% of the time now.

I believe most users using ATI cards below the 4000 series are having this problem.

I am using 2 ATI 3870 HD's, 2GB DDR3 Ram, Intel Quad Core 2.4GHZ and windows XP SP3.

The texture problem occurs when the memory runs out, after driving around etc. I read somewhere that disabling the clip capture fixed this problem for many people. At first I thought I DID have it disabled, but it seems to have enabled itself upon game restart.

Anyway, when in-game I decided to attempt to mess around with my settings one last time. I found that clip capture was ON, so I turned it back OFF (at this point everything was transparent - no textures whatsoever). So disabling it does prety much what changing your resolution would do - it dumps the texture from memory and voila - the textures come back.

The difference with this though, it either A) Takes a LOT longer to stop working again, or B) Fixes the problem completely (There are still a TON of glitches though, shadows and choppy areas, along with things popping out of no where....)

If the problem ever occurs again, all I do is go back to the game options and turn clip capture ON than turn it back OFF which dumps it out of the memory to resume a playable state.

I hope this helps anyone who is crippled by this buggy game!

REEEEEEEEEEEEEELEAAAAAAASE US A FRIGGEN PATCH!!! :D

[bnlgoi]

I believe most users using ATI cards below the 4000 series are having this problem.

I've got a 4870, and I have this problem...

[XRStatic]

I think it's a combination of things. I've tried everything suggested on these forums to get it to work but nothing has fixed it. I was playing online with someone yesterday who had similar specs as me (had a duel core though, using XPSP3 with a 4870) who had never even seen a problem.

I have no idea - but it's definitely a killer for us :(. Releasing games like this really lowers the standards for us PC gamers and is a huge reason why PC gamers give up and move onto console!

[scraggydogg]

Hi,
I'm running the game underpowered as my graphics card is a NVIDEA 7600 GT. and at first thought that being underpowered was causing a bad texture problem.
I couldn't play the game at all at first, no textures on sky and rest poor - totally unplayable.
I went through the list of updating Direct X and all the other possible fixes but it was still the same.
I looked on Rockstar Support page and found LINK (http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_gtaiv_downloads.htmltp://) to 180.48 Drivers.
This fixed my problem and will allow me to play at low settings.

Just thought i'd add my post to let people know to try the 180.84 Drivers if they have bad textures, worked for me, it's playable now at least.

For ATI (Which I don't have) they suggest using the 8.11 drivers.

Rockstar Support (http://www.rockstargames.com/support/req_support_detail.php?product=275%2C3%2CGrand+The ft+Auto+IV%2CPC%2CRockstar_Games%2Cgta4&submit=Submit)

Hope it helps someone - Scraggy

[Psaldorn]

I'd just like to confirm that, after disabling SuperFetch in Vista, I began to see textures disappearing over time, drastically so when travelling long distances and especailly around the Bohan district.

Reenabling it made it all fine again. So much for optimising my system for GTA!

So many driver reinstalls and registry fiddles.. for nowt.

[NeoX1900]

Uninstall Nvidia driver, Use Driversweeper in safemode, then let Windows update install graphics driver, worked for me

Nvidia 8800 Ultra, vista 64-bit edition

[phuzman]

Until rockstar/microshaft releases a fix I have found something finally to 'help' with the issue. It's not prety and is super annoying, but at least I can see textures 80% of the time now.

I believe most users using ATI cards below the 4000 series are having this problem.

I am using 2 ATI 3870 HD's, 2GB DDR3 Ram, Intel Quad Core 2.4GHZ and windows XP SP3.

The texture problem occurs when the memory runs out, after driving around etc. I read somewhere that disabling the clip capture fixed this problem for many people. At first I thought I DID have it disabled, but it seems to have enabled itself upon game restart.

Anyway, when in-game I decided to attempt to mess around with my settings one last time. I found that clip capture was ON, so I turned it back OFF (at this point everything was transparent - no textures whatsoever). So disabling it does prety much what changing your resolution would do - it dumps the texture from memory and voila - the textures come back.

The difference with this though, it either A) Takes a LOT longer to stop working again, or B) Fixes the problem completely (There are still a TON of glitches though, shadows and choppy areas, along with things popping out of no where....)

If the problem ever occurs again, all I do is go back to the game options and turn clip capture ON than turn it back OFF which dumps it out of the memory to resume a playable state.

I hope this helps anyone who is crippled by this buggy game!

REEEEEEEEEEEEEELEAAAAAAASE US A FRIGGEN PATCH!!! :D

where is this clip capture option?

[synx]

While in-game, hit escape and go to the game tab.

It's right under the auto-save toggle.

[Nebby_99]

The only method that fixed the texture problem for me without clobbering my FPS to less than 10, was a program called SysTweak CacheBoost. If nothing else works for you, try the free trial version and see if it helps.

It has an "optimise memory" button that instantly makes all the textures reload for me. After doing that every few minutes I could then play normally for several hours. It was awesome :D

If you're running Vista, this program seems to serve as a more efficient substitute for the SuperFetch service (which is what killed my FPS).

[anecdotik]

I finally solved the missing textures issue that way :

- very important (seen elsewhere) : defragment the partition where is installed GTA4

- I'm on XP and I upgraded RAM from 1 Go to 2.5 Go

Hope this helps

XP
P4 2.66 GHz (!!)
2.5 Go RAM
GeForce 7600GS with 180.84 drivers

[gooneybird71]

Its not an issue of old drivers, I call bull♥♥♥♥ on this. The game simply isn't ready for prime time. Absolutely ridiculous to have these graphical glitches, ♥♥♥♥ing game is unplayable.

-Gooney

[phuzman]

The only method that fixed the texture problem for me without clobbering my FPS to less than 10, was a program called SysTweak CacheBoost. If nothing else works for you, try the free trial version and see if it helps.

It has an "optimise memory" button that instantly makes all the textures reload for me. After doing that every few minutes I could then play normally for several hours. It was awesome :D

If you're running Vista, this program seems to serve as a more efficient substitute for the SuperFetch service (which is what killed my FPS).

THIS WORKED! THANK YOU! only thing is now im playing the game at 10 fps... :(