Poor Old rig? I heard that if you run the game on Medium settings on your PC, it'll be more or less equal to the Xbox360 and PS3 versions. Also, the game was optimized for
Quad-Cores, so when I finally get the game.. I'll be able to put my PC to the test.
Apparently, Rockstar says to wait until more powerful PC hardware comes out that could enable us to run the game properly in all it's glory
. At present though, only medium/high settings are feasible, playing maxed out isn't advisable unless you like slow frame rates.
Regarding the cracks for GTA4 , it appears that Rockstar has put several trapdoors into the game. For instance, car handling is ridiculously poor, camera is SHAKY..e.t.c , or so I've heard if you use a cracked EXE. Pretty neat way to protect the game, but I also heard someone figured out a way around those safeguards as well.
IIRC, the game Godfather had a similar system which prevented you from exiting the car if you used a cracked exe.
Anyway, these new types of protection methods seem to be the way to go. Operation Flashpoint's FADE protection was an interesting attempt but ultimately futile (For those of you who don't know, FADE automatically degrades the performance of the game to a point where it's no longer playable)
I hope I don't get banned for just speaking about Rockstar's anti-cracking safeguards -_-