Every year I feel the urge to replay Grand Theft Auto 4 on PC, and every year I'm disappointed. The Windows port is notoriously shoddy, and no matter which hardware I have slotted into my PC—and no matter how powerful—the same problem always arises: endless, frustrating micro-stuttering. Even if my gaming PC is basically a supercomputer compared to the meagre recommended specs for this 13-year-old game, it's plagued by constant hitching, frame drops, and frame pacing issues. It's a shame, because I love GTA 4. It might even be my favourite GTA. It's just a pig to play smoothly on a modern gaming PC.

Or it was. Last night, I finally cracked it. After several hours of scouring Reddit threads, blogs, and posts on GTAForums, trying countless alleged 'fixes' that made absolutely no difference, I discovered the root of the problem. I'm no tech expert, so I might be getting some details wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the stuttering is caused by an outdated and/or poorly implemented Direct3D/DirectDraw renderer. So to make it stop, you have to force the game to use a different, more efficient renderer—specifically Vulkan. You need a Vulkan-compatible graphics card to use this fix, but if you do, your woes could be over.

Related: Grand Theft Auto 4 Should Be Next In Line For A Remaster

PC gaming is an unpredictable, finicky thing, of course, so if you have anything other than my specific hardware/software setup, this fix might not work—or even make things worse. I can't promise anything, such is the temperamental nature of playing old, abandoned videogames on a modern PC. For reference, I'm running the Complete Edition version of GTA 4 through Steam on Windows 11, with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super, Intel i7-9700K, and 16GB of RAM. If you still want to give it a go, follow the steps below to the letter.

How to fix GTA 4 performance issues on PC

  • Download the latest version of DXVK
  • Copy d3d9.dll from the \x32 folder into your GTA 4 directory
  • Find out how much display memory you have. Press the Windows key + R to open the Run window and type in dxdiag. Navigate to the Display tab and note down the number next to Display Memory
  • Right click on GTA 4 in Steam, go to properties, and under Launch Options put -managed and -availablevidmem X, where X is a number slightly below your available display memory. For example, I have 8010 MB, so I put -availablevidmem 7850
  • Go to your Steam settings, navigate to the Shader Pre-Caching menu at the bottom, and uncheck Enable Shader Pre-Caching

That's it. But it's important to note that, on your first launch, the game might be even laggier than before. This is because (I think) the new renderer is building a cache. Run a few benchmarks, or just play for a while, and these will eventually stop—and if all has gone to plan, you'll be playing the game with none of that irritating hitching. Not only did this method stop my frame rate randomly dipping into the 40s and 50s, but it ironed those pesky frame pacing issues out permanently, and now the game is infinitely more playable.

GTA 4 PC Settings Guide

There is a slight downside to this method, however. Using DXVK means forcing anti-aliasing via the NVIDIA control panel won't work, and GTA 4 really does benefit from this. But you can use a tool called SweetFX to smooth out some of the jaggies. This post by Anton Shabunin, whose guides were the key to me getting GTA 4 running smoothly (thanks), walks you through it step by step. It's easy and well worth doing. You can also tweak the SweetFX config file to swap between SMAA/FXAA, depending on which AA method you prefer.

It's ridiculous that we have to jump through these hoops to get Grand Theft Auto 4 running well on PC, but sadly Rockstar seems to have completely abandoned it. Perhaps a remaster is on the way (and hopefully a better one than GTA: The Trilogy), but in the meantime, this is currently the best way to revisit the streets of Liberty City. It's good to be back.

Next: GTA: The Trilogy Impressions: The Good, The Bad, And The Janky