Grand Theft Auto IV
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ESRB:
Blood,Intense Violence,Partial Nudity,Strong Language,Strong Sexual Content,Use of Alcohol,Use of Drugs
Publisher: Take 2 Interactive Genre(s): Action Home Page: http://www.rockstargames.com/IV/
Oddball Video SettingsThere are also other oddities vith the video settings - according to Rockstar anisotropic filtering is Rendering Quality - bump that up trying to improve visuals and you just kill your framerate due to excessive AF. Also both Draw Distance and Detail Distance have their "zero" point set fairly high. People usually expect that at the lowest draw distance you get horrible pop-up or a permanent fog bank 30 feet ahead of you - so the obvious reaction is to bump it up. Not so with GTA IV. You need to be flying a helicopter over the city to see real differences with the draw distance slider, and the effective range seems hover between "Far" at 0 and "So Far You Can't Believe Your Eyes" at 100. As a comparison, 22 is already superior to consoles and even 0 looks quite acceptable. The only thing the slider seems to do in most cases is to lower your framerate and increase the video card memory demand while giving you a some extra detail on distant buildings and a few cranes in the horizon.
 Minimum view distance from the air. Detail Distance slider is a bit more useful - it determines at which distance you start to see smaller terrain objects, and at the lowest setting it can cause some pop up with trashcans, newspaper dispensers and things like that. This is also the slider that can impact your framerate the most - you can easily lose 20-30% of your framerate by maxing it out with little real impact in visuals while the setting of 10 will give you identical results to the consoles. On the other hand this setting does not increase the videocard memory demand, so by all means bump it up if your hardware can otherwise take it. Vehicle Density is not really a video setting at all - it determines how much traffic the city has. But it can cause terrible slowdown if your CPU is weak - each additional car is one additional AI driver, and those can add up. Also while it doesn't affect the traffic during missions, during normal driving the maximum setting can give you massive traffic jams which can be a pain to navigate through when you have the police in hot pursuit because you just happened to drive over some old lady. Shadow Density is another slider that at first look does almost nothing to the visuals. It apparently determines how far away dynamic light sources cast additional shadows. Everything still has shadows even with this setting at zero - all you are getting is extra shadows from things like headlights and streetlights. At times the effect can be pretty, but it's usually not worth losing 20-30% of your framerate for the effect. It should be noted that 0 equals consoles and the setting does nothing to the general shadows. On the subject of shadows, GTA IV's shadow system was clearly designed for the 720p resolution of the consoles. On the PC you can get some annoying dithering along the shadow edges and in cases where partially transparent objects cast shadows it can look outright ugly - the train tracks above you at the very first safe house is a good example. You get used to it and turning on post processing effects helps to hide the issue, but it's a bit distracting at first.
 Post Processing Shaders also add motion blur. Post processing effects? Well, there is one major visual setting hidden away - according to the keybindings "P" is used for Definition Toggle. In reality it should probably be labeled "Post Processing Effects Toggle". It effectively adds post processing shaders, motion blur and acts as "poor man's anti-aliasing" - it's not as good as the real deal (which doesn't work with the GTA IV engine), but it's something. It also causes near-zero performance hit on modern video cards. On the other hand you do lose some of the added texture detail of the PC version as the visuals become noticeably softer. In summary, with smarter labeling and good help texts GTA IV PC might have gained a better reputation. It's still very forward-looking engine and very beautiful in it's own "massively detailed continuous game world" way, doing many things no other game engine in the market even dares to attempt. In my books it still looks great even on Medium with Draw Distance at zero and Detail Distance at 30 and on those settings it runs just fine at 1920x1200 on a modern PC.
Related Stuff Games: Grand Theft Auto IV
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