Got GTA IV Problems? We Got Some Fixes

Grand Theft Auto IV is munching baby PCs everywhere, but some of the troubles people have experienced are not actually due to the game. Rockstar has compiled a long list of potential fixes for the most common issues.

Read on for a summary of the most common problems and solutions.

No Work! Got Some Mysterious Error Code!Here is a list of GTA IV Error Codes. Most of these are not that mysterious once you translate them to English. Remember, SP1 on Vista and S 2192 P3 on XP are not optional and neither is the installation of Games for Windows LIVE - you will get an error if you try without these.Got Error Code implying you need XP SP3 - on Vista

Apparently this might show up if your .NET is out of date. Update can be found here.

Texture problems on GeForce 7900Sorry, NVIDIA's latest driver is broken on GeForce 7900s. Wait for updated driver.Buggy shadows on ATI Radeon X1900Real bug in GTA IV, patch coming soon.Missing textures on other cardsReset your driver settings and get rid of driver tweakers or custom driver settings. Rockstar's guide is available here.Blacked out textures on ATI cardsset MipMap setting in drivers to full "Quality".Games for Windows LIVE? WTF? I want to save!

You need to either create an online Games for Windows LIVE ID or an offline LIVE profile. Online LIVE account gives you achievements, gamerscore, friends lists etc. while offline profile will allow you to just save the game. Both are free while offline profile doesn't require internet connection. Think Games for Windows LIVE ID as an username and password for your own saves in the game - multiple people can create these profiles and each gets his own saves.

Not working? Get Latest Games for Windows LIVE client.Never created a LIVE account? Rockstar has a guide for Games for Windows LIVE online sign-up and Games for Windows LIVE offline profile creation.

Not exactly rocket science, and this will be common with future PC games as Games for Windows LIVE becomes more common.

Rockstar Social Club?

Needed if you want to participate in Rockstar's GTA-themed YouTube-thingy, sharing your videos created with the new video editor etc. You can play just fine by skipping login to the whole thing. If you want to use it, you have to sign up and then link your Games for Windows LIVE account to the Social Club account. Free, but somewhat of a hassle. Rockstar Social Club account creation is here and LIVE account linking is here.

Can't set textures to High!

You need more video card memory - in practice, a 768MB GeForce 8800GTX has enough at a reasonable resolution. 640MB 8800GTS might do it if you drop the resolution. 512MB cards require a resolution drop to 1024x768 to unlock High textures and that isn't really worth it. Rockstar has a guide on GTA IV Graphics Settings.

Note that even Medium is superior to what the console versions got and that's usable on 512MB cards. If you have a 256MB card, you are stuck with low textures. Sorry. Time to upgrade.

If you insist, you can override the limtations imposed by the game with the following command line parameters. Make a new shortcut to LaunchGTAIV.exe (found in your GTA IV directory) and edit the shortcut with the following additional parameters.

-norestrictions -nomemrestrict

If forcing High textures using these options causes you to get lousy framerate or your PC bursts into flames, don't blame us.

Bad performance!

You sure you meet the Minimum Requirements? You can use our Game-o-Meter to check.

Beyond that, based on limited testing, Grand Theft Auto IV appears to be bit of a CPU hog. If it appears that you get lousy framerate no matter the video settings, you are most likely getting capped out on the CPU.

In practice you need a really fast dual core or preferrably a tri- or quad-core CPU for GTA IV. This is somewhat unusual for PC titles - vast majority of recent PC games have been limited by the video card and most recent games have hardly pushed the CPU - and even when they have done so it's been limited to a single core. GTA IV uses multi-core CPUs and gobbles up tons of CPU power.

You can also try to speed things up by disabling the Video Recorder feature.

Other visual bugs

GTA IV Readme also has a list of "known issues". No word yet which of these are driver bugs (wait for ATI/NVIDIA to fix), which are actual GTA IV bugs. My guess would be that most of these are driver issues.

NVIDIA:

General:

Occasionally the tree leaves will appear as square boxes.

6000/7000 series cards:

Cars do not show damage.Changing the resolution or minimizing the game can sometimes result in visual corruption. You can restart the game to resolve this issue.

ATI: General:

A slightly visible diagonal line appears across the screen.

1900 or less series cards:

Cars do not show damage.

3600 series cards:

Can show very noticeable banding.

3870 X2:

Rain drops show up as bright white / red dots on screen

Crossfire game side bugs:

Interior and Night time shadows blink until approached.When transitioning from interior to exterior the screen will pulse with different intensities of light for a few seconds.On occasion the water will jitter rapidly.

Also note that SLI is currently not supported at all - turn it off to actually improve performance. Crossfire should (mostly) work with Catalyst 8.11:s.

Hope this helps. If it is of any comfort, many people have no issues with the game and it really looks a lot better than on the consoles. Sure, you can't get it to run at 60fps on any realistic hardware you can buy today, but the game doesn't really need that kind of framerate to be playable.

Remember, consoles run it at 30fps or less at a resolution of 720p (1280x720) - and according to some rumors, PS3 version is actually upscaling from "630p" or 1280x630. It's not too shocking that 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 on the PC might need some serious hardware to run it properly.

For more on the subject, check out our PC Gaming Forums - GTA IV is currently a hot topic.