"GTA IV" - Liberty City Subway Ride (A/8 Line): Regular vs. iCEnhancer 2.1 Final - PC

Skip to the iCEnhancer version: 10:05

Description:
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A ride across town on the LTA Subway A/8 line from Manganese East station on Algonquin (Manhattan) through Dukes (Queens) via Francis International Airport station, then Broker (Brooklyn) via Hove Beach station, and then the journey ends back in Algonquin at Easton Station. The stock cinematic camera is used to give a broader view of the city's scenery, where you will see the buildings of Algonquin from across the river and other places of interest.


List of the route's LTA Subway stations in order of arrival:
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Manganese East
Huntington Street (Lower)
Lynch Street
Francis International Airport
Huntington Street (Upper)
Schottler
Hove Beach
Easton


Technical notes:
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The comparison was tested to showcase night and day, so I started running into the station at 3:30am (in-game time - 2 seconds real-time = 1 minute in-game time) on both versions so that it would progress to dawn at around the half-way point of the journey.

Grand Theft Auto IV was patched to 1.0.4.0 for better iCEnhancer compatibility (for example, Ambient Occlusion only works with patches 1.0.3.0 and 1.0.4.0) and because the top of Rotterdam Tower (Empire State Building) is properly-lit (the top lighting doesn't fully render in 1.0.7.0 until you're right up close to it). Performance-wise, 1.0.7.0 has always been my favorite for its superior FPS consistency but I decided not to use it because I really wanted the top lighting on Rotterdam Tower to be seen from afar.

My opinion is that iCEnhancer looks great above ground, a real winner in terms of adding further realism to an already decently-realistic-looking game, but in the stations and tunnels, it's seemingly not optimized (the trains are way too bright and their carriages' dynamic lighting does not seem to be affected by the illumination of the stations and the tunnels). Various tweaking around did help a bit but at the cost of the above-ground scenery, so I got over it and reverted everything to default and applied the default amount of depth-of-field blur via the iCEnhancer Config Tool.

You will also notice an overall decline of FPS in the iCEnhancer version due to the fact that I left the settings at their default values, which are all high, to maximize the effect and because Fraps is a pile of horseshit compared to Dxtory (since you can install custom codecs) with the Ut Video Codec Suite (the suite comes with YUV and RGB lossless codecs, and they are faster than the stock Dxtory codecs, probably due to less writes per second to the hard drive). I used Dxtory for the regular version but for the iCEnhancer version, I had to use Fraps because Dxtory doesn't hook on to GTA IV when iCEnhancer is applied (or the game crashes when attempted). I did manage to get Dxtory to hook on two occasions through rigorous trial and error, but it was during my tweaking-around stage; I had to quit the game on both occasions to further experiment with iCEnhancer settings and I haven't managed to hook it since then, which is a pity.

In the video you will see the World Trade Center mod and a mod in which the train models are made to better reflect the New York City trains. I also found a mod to replace the stock train sounds with more realistic New York City ones and I have applied that also.


List of the stuff I used to make the video with URLs for download:
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Train models: http://www.gtagarage.com/mods/show.ph...
Train sounds: http://www.gta4-mods.com/misc/realism...
World Trade Center: http://hbxworks.com/wtc/
iCEnhancer: http://icelaglace.com/
Fraps: http://www.fraps.com/download.php (a registered product is required to remove the watermark)
Dxtory: http://dxtory.com/v2-download-en.html (a registered product is required to remove the watermark)
Ut Video Codec Suite: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Ut-Vid...


Relevant machine specs:
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Intel Core i7 920 (overclocked to 3.36GHz)
18GB Corsair Vengeance DDR-1600MHz RAM (overclocked to 1684MHz)
MSI Twin Frozr III N570GTX Power Edition/OC (overclocked to 925/2300MHz)
Samsung SyncMaster S24A350H (1920x1080 @ 60Hz)
WD Caviar Black 640GB (OS drive)
WD Caviar Black 1.5TB (Games/Programs Drive)
Windows 8 RTM Professional x64