I’m way worse framerates, battery life overall performance with GTA 4. I really didn’t expect this as GTA 5 ran an extremely stable 60 FPS and only 10 watt battery drain. Even with the explosive bullets cheat and 5 stars not once did I see a frame drop. With 4 though, I had to drop it to 40 fps and still encounter occasional freezing with medium settings.
GTA IV was terrible optimized. I tried it on my modern desktop with 3800X and 3070 and was barely getting 60fps without any mods (with mods it was getting way better while having far better visuals). I was able to get GTA IV EFLC to run at constant 50fps with graphics mods on my Steam deck.
4 has always been a shit show. I dont think I’ve ever played a well optimized version including the original release. It’s personal preference but I always wished they would remake 4 in 5’s engine. I love that story and characters but it is miserable to play
PC ports being awful was actually the norm back then. We PC gamers used to praise companies that released good ports, when it should be the bare minimum. Granted we still get crappy ports from time to time, even with big game releases that should be taken good care of (looking at you, Last of Us Part 1), but generally speaking, I’d say that awful ports are now less common than good ones.
gta4 has a famously bad pc port while gta5 is optimized pretty well