GTA IV PC Edition Plagued With Problems

Complaints have been hitting forums everywhere about issues with the newly released PC edition of GTA IV.

Threads are popping up on forums on GameSpot, Steam, IGN, and elsewhere with loads of complaints from gamers about a host of performance issues. Poor frame rates even on powerful rigs, short draw distances, crashes, and missing textures are among the list of numerous issues gamers have with the title.

The technical support section of Rockstar's official site acknowledges a host of known issues.
Known issues related to video cards and drivers:

• Owners of Nvidia 7900 Series Cards - Click here for critical information about graphics issues.
• Owners of ATI cards and Nvidia cards that are not in the 7900 Series Cards - Click here if experiencing missing textures.
• Owners of ATI Series Cards - Click here for a fix to image quality (blacked-out textures) with certain MipMap detail settings are used.
• Owners of ATI 1900 Series - At present the shadows may flicker and form large triangles in some instances. A patch will be released soon to correct this issue.

As for performance issues on high-end rigs, Rockstar's tech support documentation contained the following explanation: "Most users using current PC hardware as of December 2008 are advised to use medium graphics settings. Higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available."

As user Bahaa3000 said at GameSpot, "Why the hell would they do such thing ?? who is going to buy a game that his +2000$ can't even run it on high settings ???!!!"

GenTom, the first user posting in the GameSpot forums, said he was experiencing "quite poor performance in Grand Theft Auto 4". His rig features a Gigabyte x48 motherboard, Intel E8400 CPU @ 3.4ghz, 4gb DDR2 RAM and an ATI Radeon 4870x2 GPU.

Users at the Steam forums are trying to rally the troops together to forum a sort of boycott by posting negative reviews at sites like Amazon.com. Of the 58 current reviews at Amazon 47 have a single star and only 8 reviews have more than 3 stars.