Can’t Change Graphics Settings in GTA 4

It seems that Grand Theft Auto 4 has a bug in it when you attempt to play it on computers with video cards with more than 2GB RAM on board. GTA 4 ends up thinking that the computer has insufficient resources to play the game on anything other than the absolute lowest settings.

This can be frustrating when you’ve got a rig that is more than capable of playing any modern game without skipping a beat.

Anyway, there is a relatively simple solution if you’ve bought and installed the game via Steam as follows:

1. Open Steam,
2. Click Library,
3. Find Grand Theft Auto IV in the list,
4. Right click on it and select Properties,
5. On the General tab click the Launch Options button,
6. Type in the following:
   

   -nomemrestrict -norestriction

7. Click OK then click Close.

Otherwise, if you have installed the game without Steam, you can do the following:

1. Locate the folder containing GTA 4 on your computer,
2. Create a text file called commandline.txt in the GTZ 4 folder,
3. Copy and pate the following into the text file:
   

   -nomemrestrict -norestriction

4. Save the text file.

Fire up GTA 4 and now you should be able to alter all of the graphics settings. Be warned that automatic detection of settings may not work so you may need to manually set all of the graphics options before you start playing.