HOWTO: Make GTAIV moddable + Disable bloom & blur

[[DRuG]NikT]

Developed by bolshoi of darkside_rg, this performance tweak has similar results to the no speed & motion blur made available in San Andreas by [DRuG]Slick... Excepts of ideas posted by iTrader at http://www.ehoza.com/v4/forum/tutorial/35347-how-increase-gta-4-performance-pc.html

Disable bloom effect and blur:

Can't be done in-game, must be modded manually.

Thanks to the heavy layers of protection incorporated into GTAIV, any change to the files will terminate the game on start up. So you have to trick it into thinking the files are unchanged.

Follow these instructions carefully:

1. Extract magic.bat to your main GTAIV folder, same as GTA_IV.EXE

   magic.zip

   (2.74 KiB) Downloaded 893 times

2. Run magic.bat - This batch will allow you to modify the game files without causing the game to terminate on start up.
3. Navigate to "Grand Theft Auto IV\common\data\" folder and locate "visualSettings.dat"
4. Open it with Wordpad in order to change graphics settings.

Anything you do from this point must be done carefully - make backups of the files you edit to revert back in case something goes wrong.

To disable bloom and blur:

1. Open "visualSettings.dat"
2. Find "#Config Values for Camera Events Val start Val End MB start MB End"
3. Change all the values to zeros - if the value is 10.00 change it to 0.00 and so on... this will disable blur with camera movements.
4. Then you'll find "# Misc Values"...
5. Same as above, change all the values to zero EXCEPT FOR THESE LINES then save:

Code: Select all

misc.Multiplier.heightStart    100
misc.Multiplier.heightEnd    250.00
misc.CrossPMultiplier.Gamma


Don't forget to save the file

To force-disable vertical sync:

1. Create a txt file and name it "commandline.txt"
2. Paste the following & save to your GTA IV directory (same directory with GTAIV.exe):

Code: Select all

-norestrictions
-nomemrestrict
-novblank
-noprecache
-percentvidmem 100


(This will disable memory restrictions, Vsync, and precache of resources).

Still not satisfied with the framerates? To set it to absolute lowest quality, add these lines to your "commandline.txt":

Code: Select all

-renderquality 0
-shadowdensity 0
-texturequality 0
-viewdistance 0
-detailquality 0


Save... Play... Enjoy!

After you are sure the game is running fast and smooth enough, start modifying the in-game graphics settings and increase resolution, texture details, etc as long as it doesn't cause any lag.

[[DRuG]Mortal]

Nice! Not needed for me, I used filecheckfix.asi and I like the blur/bloom personally.

iTrader is a karma rating system for doing business on forums, username is on the left

[[DRuG]NikT]

I just finished GTAIV today - I had been stuck for about 24 hours on a bit where you have to climb into the chopper, but the game is (still) bugged in such a way that you can't tap the keys at a frequent enough rate unless your framerate is locked @ 30fps. The way this was accidentally found was by trying to capture the problem with FRAPS, only to find that while fraps was recording, the problem didn't occur... it locks the framerate at 30 while recording.

[[DRuG]Mortal]

Yea, that part was tough! I got a 360 controller and it was much easier. I found that if I tap slower than should be necessary, it helps on keys.

The game was epic, huh? If we compare it to III, I can't wait for for VC!!

[[DRuG]NikT]

Note - carefully filtered to remove spoiler - please don't wreck the outcome for peoples, folks.

Yeh I loved it.. I have an ending saved for each outcome... the storyline and missions are subtly different for the two outcomes I've found so far.. it's left me tempted to get the big walkthrough book from EB to see what other subtle differences there'd be, say, if you chose not to do any of the mafia jobs or something.

Please ensure your responses don't give away anything about the storyline.

[[DRuG]Shane0]

If your talking about the A4 sized magazine book thats about $20 or so from eb then its worth it. I got one for me and slick, and I found it to be very helpful throughout when I was playing GTA IV, not sure about slick.

[[DRuG]KillFrenzy]

How much does this actually improve your framerate? I wonder if it works with Steam as well. I'll give it a shot.

UPDATE: Well it didn't really improve my framerate. I guess it's because my CPU is the bottleneck, not the Graphics Card.

[[DRuG]NikT]

I found disabling bloom/blur improved my frames massively.. that's with a 9800GT 1Gb