It enforces use of Microsoft's still clunky Games For Windows Live and Rockstar Social Club, and as benefits its status as a port of a game first released on the xbox 360 and PS3, it doesn't provide you with a great deal of control over how the game looks. For example, there's no option to add or remove anti-aliasing- an element that's sorely missed, as the game suffered badly from jagged edges on our test rig. The graphics options in the game appear capped at a level determined by the game's appraisal of the resources your PC offers.
The detail settings are only locked if you play by the rules, though. To get around the restrictions, create a new shortcut for GTA4, rick click on it and select properties. Add the text '-norestriction' to the end of the target line and start the game from that shortcut. This allows you to set the detail settings higher, but it won't make the game any less demanding for your PC.
GTA4 capped our GeForce 8800GT-equipped test machine at a resolution of 1680x1050, and also decided that texture quality shouldn't go above medium while the render quality- which appears to be another term for anisotropic filtering- was capped at high. There are also four distance and density settings. These comprise view distance (set at 25), detail distance (37), vehicle density (26) and shadow density (3).
Despite these settings, the game ran poorly... ...After some experimenting, we found that view distance, detail distance, and vehicle density could be set to 10 without object popping up abruptly, while shadow density could be dropped to 1 without much difference. These changes added 3fps to the minimum frame rate- raising it to 22, and increased the average by 6fps to 31fps.
Dropping texture quality to low added only 1fps to our minimum frame rate, and nothing tot he average. Changing the render quality made no difference to performance whatsoever, even when it was on low. Reducing distance and density settings further resulted in everything from cars to old ladies popping into existence right next to our character.
It was clear that we were going to have to drop the resolution. At 1280x1024 (the native resolution of a 17inch display), we increased the minimum by another 1fps. The game was already in desperate need of AA, so we didn't want to drop it any further. However, further resolution drops made no difference to the frame rate, so we were stuck just shy of a playable frame rate [of 25fps,] at 24fps.
...
GTA4 is clearly a CPU-intensive game, and a 3GHz dual-core CPU was obviously a bottleneck, so our graphics tweaking [overclocking mentioned in the missing para]. If you have an Intel Core 2 Due and want to play GTA4, this is another great reason to overclock.
With a 3GHz dual-core CPU, we saw a 19fps minimum and a 25fps average. We then decided to find out how the game responded to a quad core CPU. Using the same components, except for the CPU, which was swapped for a quad core Core 2 Quad Q9300 also clocked at 3GHz, the results increased to a 26fps minimum and a 38fps average.
If you have an older LGA775 CPU and mid range-graphics card that struggles to play the game, but you can't afford to upgrade to Core i7 yet, and Intel Core 2 Quad could be just what you need to make your criminal explosions smoother.
