https://www.protondb.com/app/12210 Here's a page of people reviewing the Linux compatibility of GTA 4. Any game that is on Steam will have a page like this on ProtonDB.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I played it twice on linux. It's actually one of those games that run better than they do on windows thanks to the large amount of fixes and workarounds specific to this game that are in DXVK. You don't even need to cap the framerate or limit the affinity to one core during the ending to prevent the helicopter bug. Personally, I would recommend playing a repack that already has all the community fixes for the game, but if you don't know how to do it, just play it on steam and you'll be fine.
Is it worth it playing though? Asking as someone who played all the originals upto San Andreas, when I first checked out IV, it just felt like more of the same and I lost interest.
I really enjoyed it
Main game has a nice, more down to earth storyline compared to any of the other installments. Same with TLaD if I remember correctly. TBoGT was a lot of fun, but more in line with the other GTA games in that it gets a bit too out of hand, particularly with the Yusuf missions.
Game mechanics are nothing special. Think GTA V with a lot less polish.
Well, it looks like shit even for 2008, the gameplay hasn't aged well, it's incredibly annoying when you fail a mission, it's full of bugs, but it has the best story in the series in my opinion, the characters feel very genuine, I don't want to spoil it but it will make you think, plus the brutal critique of american society shines through as much as the other games if not more.
Not really.
Yes, a LOT of people. There's countless videos on YouTube, especially since the Steam Deck's release.
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Vulkan runs the game better than DirectX 9, I will say that much. Had no issues on Arch with Nvidia
I used dxvk on windows and it was a definite improvement for GTA iv.
Quite the difference, isn't it. DirectX was often really wonky back then
Two things to keep in mind though, I'm on Iris Xe graphics which has poor DX9 performance (it's done entirely in software idk how) and GTA IV is just a really horrible port on PC. It's cpu rendered shadows and just general jank. Early parts of the map run much worse.
Performance increases were mild but noticable. On both my old computer (i7 8550U and a Radeon 530 2 GB DDR3 gpu) and new computer (i5-1135G7 and Iris XE graphics), I got better frametime consistency and a noticable improvement in fps
It's also been a while since I've played GTA IV. I was running older drivers then and there have been major improvements since.
Edit: vulkan performance has been somewhat consistent on Arc but I was using 2017 drivers due to stability issues. I'd probably see a marginal increase running modern drivers using dxvk.
Runs on steam deck fine. That's Arch btw
I'm somewhat convinced the btw is just part of the name at this point
Generally I've found it's safe to assume a game does work on Linux nowadays (assuming it's on Steam) even if it explicitly says it's unsupported.
If you want to look it up ahead of time check out protondb, it's a user driven database of how well games run out of the box and how to get them to work if they don't. Will generally answer the "will X game work on Linux" question pretty quickly
Works on both my PC which runs Wayland on Arch and the Steam Deck. No glaring issues.
I did. It was fine and about what I expected.
It's not a terribly well optimized game, but that was true on Windows too.
Edit: couple other deets, I'm on a 6600XT and didn't have any visual issues or anything unexpected. Definitely some stutter and I don't remember my settings but it was cranked pretty high. Certainly very playable. I think I used Proton Experimental.
This is gonna be more windows centric as I game on windows, but I do use dxvk so it's probably not going to be that far off.
I5-1135G7, iris xe 80 eu, 16 gb of ram. I got around 40 fps in the benchmark on dx9, 50 fps on dxvk. This was on older Intel arc drivers. Vulkan performance has been consistent on their drivers but there may be some improvement. I was running 1080p medium settings, no anti aliasing and tri-linear as filtering.
I had an old i7 8550u laptop with a Radeon 530 2GB DDR3 graphics card. It ran GTA IV about the same with an older version of dxvk, but it had some performance issues because I couldn't find a higher wattage adapter for it and would throttle.
ALSO TURN OFF SHADOWS. For whatever reason, it's handled by the CPU.
I didn't know you even could run dxvk on windows, what's the reason for doing that?
Well, DirectX only managed to mostly catch up with Vulkan with DirectX12, so translating DirectX11 to Vulkan will likely improve the performance because Vulkan is a considerably more optimized API. GTA IV uses DirectX9, so the performance gain with DXVK can be quite big.
I played it two years ago and ran into slight issues with shadows. The game has the same quirks as it does on Windows with some quick time events being linked to the framerate.
Modding the game on Linux is quite difficult.
Yup, and it ran well. I played through the full game without any issues until the end, when you need to do a certain QTE (unfortunately after a lengthy mission, which had to be restarted each attempt) and had to manually set a framerate cap.
Specs at the time:
- CPU: Ryzen 1700
- GPU: GTX 960 4GB
- RAM: 16GB @ ~3000 MHz
- NVMe SSD
That hardware is pretty old, so I'd guess you'd have no problem if you're specs are anything recent.
I run it on a pretty old PC and it mostly runs fine. I do get audio stuttering sometimes, but I think that might have something to do with having it installed on a HDD instead of an SSD.