GTA IV ENB crash on startup

[turtlepleasure]

I've spent the last few days trying to troubleshoot this to no avail. When I launch the game with either wrapper or injector, it hangs on the intro screen. The intro music keeps playing, Windows doesn't realize the process is unresponsive, and it CTD's after a few minutes. Launching without ENB works fine, and I have confirmed this issue is preset agnostic. I am running a legal (Steam) copy of the game downgraded to patch 1.0.4.0, the only other mod I am running is Xliveless to remove the GFWL DRM.

I've reinstalled the game multiple times, disabled all overlays and anything that could feasibly hook into the game process, wiped and reinstalled the latest GPU driver (just the driver - no adrenaline control panel or "extra features"), reinstalled DirectX, placed d3dx9_26.dll d3dx9_40.dll and d3dx9_43.dll into the game folder (as per instructions), tried dxwrapper, DXVK, and lighting incense & praying to the machine spirit. The only antivirus I have is Windows Defender, and I have both added an exception for the game's folder and turned off protection entirely.

After looking at this forum, it's apparent that RDNA cards have problems with DX 9 ENB. But this doesn't seem to be universal - the only other DX9 game I've installed ENB into is Fallout New Vegas, and it works on this PC without any issue. I am completely stumped and would greatly appreciate some insight on this matter. Thanks for reading.

Specs:
Ryzen 3700x @ stock
Radeon 5700xt @ stock
1TB NVMe SSD
32GB DDR4 RAM

[ENBSeries]

This is very unpopular mod these days since release of gta5, so i don't have any bug reports about it and not know what could be wrong. Just can tell some generic advices, like downgrade video driver to 22.5.1 version (recent is buggy with some mod versions in other games), try to set compatibility of the game executable, turn off there screen optimizations of any kind.

[turtlepleasure]

This is very unpopular mod these days since release of gta5, so i don't have any bug reports about it and not know what could be wrong. Just can tell some generic advices, like downgrade video driver to 22.5.1 version (recent is buggy with some mod versions in other games), try to set compatibility of the game executable, turn off there screen optimizations of any kind.

Downgrading to 22.5.1 had no effect unfortunately. However, I found a workaround. Running the game through DXVK by adding it as a proxy library in enbseries.ini works like a charm, and runs better to boot. I have no idea how a translation layer is able to improve performance by over 50%, increase stability and fix compatibility issues with shader mods, but evidently there is something very wrong with the way GTA IV uses DX9.