Yeah, I installed on that rig Windows 7 64 bits. I'll try that. Also that problem is very similar. Will try that and come back with some updates.

I had no problems pre-patch, but after the most recent patch the game started acting very oddly. When I looked at a wall it would load in all the textures, I'd look away and look back and they'd load in all over again.

I'm saying this because it could be that when you turn the camera it tries to reload all the textures on the buildings you're looking at, which lowers the framerate.

Yeah I remember that. If I recall correctly the initial problem for lower end cpu's was that GTA 4 used to load all textures within a certain amount of units of the player, regardless of FOV or obscurements. (So the insides of buildings, obscured people, obscured walls and objects).

They then did a full turn on that patch and changed it so that it fresh loads textures that are in the FOV and uses placeholder lo-res textures for the others. This eased the pressure off the CPU on initial loading as you moved around, but increased the load on the GPU as it re-rendered everything everytime it went in and out of view.

is this the torrent with the cmd prompt launcher? my flatmate dled this over xmas and it kills the game when you turn = his would almost lock entirely with no noticable rape of any component; we installed my legit copy and worked fine=)

Yeah that's the one. But it doesn't matter anymore because he got the Episodes from Liberty city thingy which works fine. Thanks for all the help tho'