This conversation is a continuation of HD4000 4es unrelated to GTA4 that may be continued here if your HD4000 crashes when idle: http://communities.intel.com/thread/36836
After their perfected solution by the skilled staff here at Intel... I from this non-crashing environment confirmed by ten days of near tortured crashless uptime, installed sp3 on my winXPro sp2 Intel DH61CR/i3-3225 HD4000 system, rebooted and proceeded to play with GTA IV. This is HD 4000 set to full-time dedicated max 1024mb in bios, with all drivers updated, and eventually i even got the game to run and look beautiful in its stock format only patched to 1.0.4.0. Playing the game, running in a straight line at near full graphics quality was enough to please me. Turning to look around though was horrific, the display drops to single frames per second at best and at worst crashes this very same display driver every single time. Surely the game lacked proper load testing as their non-following camera evidences, but i don't mind lag, this wasn't lag. Graphics level makes little difference, from high 900mb to absolute zero 200mb GTA reported memory usage, turning your view crashes the game; graphics level only changes the time before crash from 1 minute to 10 minutes, with 19 out of 20 crashes in one evening in a standard display freeze-and-reboot message as listed in the last thread and once, my first ever XPro blue screen, in 10 years I've never seen a blue screen. Seriously not since 98. It spoke of an infinite loop, saving my system from the end of the world otherwise as the sound skipped in the background. The majority of the GTA4 crashes resulted from the near instant display of a complex object, such as spinning around to reveal a shiny new taxicab with headlights beaming on you, or suddenly coming across a tremendous and complex sculpture in a park, though two of these instances did not result in crashes but 30-60 second freezes followed by normal play. The crashes always occurred after less than 10 seconds of frozen display
Everyone ignorantly nay says HD4000 as being a movie display system, they say HD4000 absolutely can not play GTA4, but I've seen what it can do, here, as i played on zero graphics for 20 minutes straight in one beautiful instance of mayhem and madness, and elsewhere. I play Far Cry near-full graphics seamlessly, Played I Am Alive 2012 faultlessly, the power is there on my i3-3225 to play tough games, and I've a great tolerance for low frame rate and lag. Crashes aren't part of the deal though. You are close to perfection on these drivers. I've not seen this complex-object crash result in any other game than GTA4, and I've tested dozens of the award wining titles in the 2005-2010 range, GTA IV is alone in its difficulties and universal in its crashing of your Intel software on every instance. Don't stop now your previous updates resolved significant errors. And no one can deny GTA4's girth among gamers. Even us casual types.
Taking all ideas, answering all questions. My dxdiag and other technical data unrelated to GTA4 is available on the previous thread: http://communities.intel.com/thread/36836