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Hi all, I'm having a problem here. My computer is relatively new, and last year I bought the entire GTA set, and they worked just fine when I got them. Six months later they started lagging bad when I played them again. This started happening last February (some time after I installed my cable modem), and it still hasn't been resolved. What happens is that when I play the games they will lag real bad, especially while driving, and so will the sound which also makes a cracking noise. And its does this only for the ones with 3d rendering, GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas.

Other graphics intensive games (Like Doom 3) work fine on my system, so I wasn't sure if it was a problem with the games themselves until the other day when I got The Godfather game (also an open world type game); it does the exact same thing! I thought that perhaps a process was running during the games that hindered performance, but I've shut down all the ones that could be causing the problem. I've also done virus scans and updated my drivers. Somebody told me that I needed a new sound card, but I don't see how that could be when the games worked just fine when I got them.

System specs are:

Compaq Presario
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Nvidia Geforce 6200
2 ghz CPU
512 mb RAM

Please help me out here

Hey there, welcome to the forums.

The problem with the GTA series and The Godfather..is they're both the same game engine just with different textures.

However, it could very well be the sound card. What you can do to test it, is disable the onboard sound, go back into windows, and play the game.

As you have a Compaq, restart your computer and press F2, this will give you the setup screen. In here there will be an option to turn your sound card off (disabled). Do this, and restart into windows. If the game still lags out, the sound card is not the problem.

Ok, I did that, and its not the sound card because its still lagging.

I'm at my wits end now.

i would make sure you dont have like any program running in the background ebauce those could lag you (I am a bigg pc gamer counter strike,DOD,Jedi acdemy, SW BF2 ect.

does it run off a cd thats really scratched?
try setting the graphic setting on low just to see what happens?