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Introduction#

Welcome to Gillian's Grand Theft Auto IV Modding Guide.

This is a centralized, all-in-one guide. It includes steps for optimizing, tweaking, fixing, improving the game, experiencing multiplayer and more!

This guide aims to be as unbiased as possible, trying to only provide relevant information to modding GTA IV. Any listed mods or information do not reflect my personal stance towards anybody and I'd prefer if this guide was unaffected by personal views.

This guide is not affiliated with Rockstar Games, Rockstar North, or Take-Two Interactive. Following the steps in this guide may violate Rockstar's End User License Agreement (EULA), and if you contact their support, they may refuse to help you because of the EULA violation. I am not the author of any of the following modifications, so any bugs/crashes/errors should be reported to the developers themselves.

Prerequisites#

  • In order for this guide to be useful to you, please make sure that the following requirements are met:
    • A PC running Windows 10/11 or any up-to-date Linux distribution suited for gaming.
    • You must own the game on Steam or the Rockstar Games Launcher. Pirated versions are not supported. Retail versions with 1.0.8.0 are not supported, but should work as long as you get rid of the DRM.
    • Your PC must at least meet the minimum requirements of the game. For a pleasant experience, however, it should also meet DXVK's requirements (ignore Linux requirements such as Wine if you're running Windows; older GPUs may meet the 1.10.3 requirements instead).
    • The game should not be located in C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) to avoid permission issues. This is irrelevant for Steam users.
    • Make sure you have enough free space on your drive (the base game takes about 22GB, a backup will take just as much, plus count in all the modding you'd do - reserve at least 70GB counting the game too).
    • You need to have an archivator installed. I recommend 7-Zip.
    • Make sure you have the game's prerequisites installed (they're already taken care of by Steam and the Rockstar Games Launcher) - Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 x86 and DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010).

Gameplay Demo#

Your game will look and play roughly like this after finishing the modding (a severely outdated drag-and-drop archive has been used for these videos - up-to-date version will provide even better results).

catsmackaroo's Guide#

catsmackaroo's old guide was the motivation behind making the original guide. My guide has evolved long since, and now catsmackaroo plans to do a new series of videos introducing people to modding IV partially based off my guide. Here's the first part of it:

Sections#

If you have no need for the in-depth tutorials, you can simply install the drag-and-drop archive and you are ready to go.

Otherwise, start with optimization.

Next page
Drag-and-Drop Archive
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Optimization
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Credits