-
Step 1
Figure out what your system has exactly. With minimum required processing power at 1.83 duo core or the equilalent processors the game will run at about 20 FPS, highest at 28 FPS. With 2.5 duo core you will get about 30 FPS, and Quad Cores should get 40 FPS and above.
-
Step 2
Determine and update drivers for your graphics card. Consider running a program called Driver Wweeper before installing new drivers to ensure that all previous versions have been removed. Links provided in resources below.
Note: Nvidia users should turn hyper threading OFF in the advanced NVidia control panel. -
Step 3
Defrag your hard drive, and use Microsoft's contig to defrag the GTA IV folder on your computer. Use resources below to find out how.
-
Step 4
Rockstar has provided temporary fixes for the memory leak issues in GTA IV. To use them create a notepad document called commandline.txt in your GTA IV folder and include one of the following commands
-memrestrict 188743680 LOW TEXTURES (256M Video Cards)
-memrestrict 209715200
-memrestrict 230686720
-memrestrict 262144000 MED TEXTURES (512M Video Cards)
-memrestrict 293601280
-memrestrict 314572800
-memrestrict 629145600 HIGH TEXTURES (1Gig+ Video Cards)
-memrestrict 650117120
-memrestrict 681574400
Start with the lowest for your current texture settings and figure out what works best. -
Step 5
In addition to memory restrictions, if you are getting kicked frequently from online multiplayer games due to "computer running too slowly" you may want to turn your view distance and other settings down so that you can enable High Textures, these for some reason allow you to load things faster while driving around the city resulting in fewer disconnections. Additionally you will want to keep your computer as cool as possible because over heating often occurs which causes stuttering and results in being disconnected for "computer running too slowly."
-
Step 6
Play around with the settings, but when running benchmarks take note of CPU usage because GTA IV is a highly CPU intensive game, do anything you can to reduce CPU usage if you wish to increase performance.
