Just put in the first person mod, v1.22 by C06alt, had to modify it a little to get it to perfectionay. The mod even has cruise control, CRUISE CONTROL PEOPLE. here i am for last 4 years not having CC when I coulda had CC.
now thats outta the way. lets talk about the "best graphical mod for gta 4 ever" VISUALiV
why is this mod not getting more attention than it is? no one is playing gta 4 anymore, dont think so.
I see new people asking about mods and what patches to use
I see people that have been using mods like enb and suffering with truly massive frame drops on an already sluggish game.
I see people asking about forms of anti-aliasing that can be used for gta 4
the reason it seems to me is that fun can still be had from a game as long as some attention is paid to it, and by that i mean turning it into a sandbox game, because hay you beat the game right? right...? heh I know I didnt, saving that for when im really bored
heres what you do to revitalize your gta 4 experience, and ill be posting this in a different place in this forum as well not just here.
What you will need
1. Its imperative to have the latest driver for your graphics card, thats just my personal belief.
2. latest version of directx link here
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=81093. Things to make gta more booful;
- VISUALiV 1.7.8b10 (latest)
- Ultimate texture pack v2 (its a large file(s) but its worth it, makes the roads so mush better.)
- TreesmodIV 1.1 by Eryk03 (this will help with fps and will also give the trees a more natural green look, but only if you have VisualiV and set the in game colour settings appropriately as given by Robi29.
- InjectSMAA or InjectFXAA either one will do fine, the fxaa seems to take less power so if fps is your game then get that one. but if you are really concerned about FPS then use Robi29's special fps files as they offer an improvement (included in the folder under bonuses).
Installation order...
1. gta4 duh.
2. 1.0.7.0 patch
3. Ultimate texture pack - if you want to kill two winged creatures via one compressed hunk of matter then you can copy the treesmod files right into the texture pack props section (vegetation) copy over those files so next time you can just copy over the whole texture pack and have the tree mod in there already.
3b. Put the injectsmaa or injectfxaa files into the main gta folder, its that easy.
3c. man i totally forgot this, im a little tired. Install the Visualiv files now too, simply copy and paste stuff. Instructions are included.
4. simple trainer v6.4 friggin greatest trainer for a game if there ever was one. this thing is like god cheating in a game. it has that much power and features. this is basically what will turn your game into a semi sandbox. you will need a special file called an asi loader, it is used to access and modify the games memory registers, i think. It is what will allow you to use the trainer. Yaasil is the one i use. 'Yet another asi loader'
5. now that you have those things installed, you need to reboot ( you can never reboot too many times) it will clear the memory and allow for.... well just do it okay.
6. If you have an Nvidia card i recommend going into the display controls accessed by right click on desktop and going to the manage 3d settings, then program settings, then find the gta launcher exe selection and set prefer maximum gpu performance as apposed to adaptive and also set threaded optimization to on. click apply, close that, and run the game. Remember also that you have to install gamesforwindowslive program, the older version is preferred, if you want to be able to save your game. Now for tweaking the settings.
This is what I call my 420 perf guide for GTA4, you will see why its a magic number soon enough
First make a txt file in the main gta folder called commandline.txt and enter in these two lines without the quotes
"-norestrictions" - if you want to be able to use the following settings without the game restricting them to the hardware in the computer or you want high textures
"-availablevidmem 1.3" - if you have 512 MB of video memory and dont want texture pop in, i know it's not the right numbers to correspond with 512 but trust me it works very well. Its 640MB, and by setting it to this, it only lets the textures spill into the system ram a little bit but really takes care of the pop in.
"-nomemrestrict" - if you have more than 1 GB of video memory and plenty of system ram
7. once in the game go to settings(options) and select graphics, if you have 512MB of video ram
textures - medium
reflection resolution - high
water quality - medium (robi has made the water like way better than it ever was on high at the medium setting, he did something with the shader files.)
shadow quality - high (once again robi has also improved the shadows by a great deal.)
night shadows - off (they are totally unnecessary and take a bunch of cpu cycles and dont work properly even half the time)
texture filter quality - 16x anisotropic filtering
view distance - 50
detail distance - 50
vehicle density - 20 (seems to give an ok balance, Robi29's bonus files have an option for more peds if you find that 20 isnt enough.
definition - on (what this really means is that there wont be a blurry post process that is a very lame attempt at anti aliasing)
vsync - on (it really does make the frames smoother and without the shearing effect from turning around, and therefore its more realistic.)
now if im right, because ive only tested these settings with a resolution of 1600x900, my native resolution, the used memory info at the bottom should read 420MB.
so thats basically it, i just want to make sure that everyone is getting the best experience they can with this and i believe these are the optimal settings for mid to high end pcs of yesteryear. if you have a computer better than mine then i would suggest starting with these settings and adding high textures and so on especially if you have a gfx card with 1.5GB or more of ram.
Cant wait for the next one Robi, im on it like white on rice. Ill be adding this guide to another section of this forum.
here are my specs AMD Phenom II X4 960T @3.2 MSI 790GX-G65 v4.4 4GB DDR3 1333 320 GB WD Caviar Blue 16mb cache EVGA Geforce 250 GTS 512MB @ 750 1833 2250 windows 7 64bit ultimate sp1 latest windows updates aswell
This post has been edited by hexelbit on Monday, Mar 5 2012, 00:12 
Attention:
. I find FXAA blurs too much of the texture, despite doing a better job on the edges. Gives that sort of cartoony look typical of icehancer and many ENB builds. To each their own though 
