Overview
Rockstar makes amazing games, thats common knowledge by now. Their PC ports however are not so great, actually they are pretty horrendous for their poor performance and some bugs when you tweak stuff that shouldn’t be tweaked.This guide will detail a couple of short fixes that can be done in under 10 minutes. These fixes will not change the core game, it will still remain the same vanilla game as it was before, just more playable with a lot of bugs fixed. After you’re done with this, your game experience will be highly improved.This guide is for Grand Theft Auto Vice City but it will also work for other older games such as GTA 3, San Andreas and even non-GTA games such as Bully.
Step 1: SilentPatch
Grand Theft Auto Vice City suffers from a lot of small pesky bugs that will worsen the quality of your playtime. Luckily for you, GTAForums user Silent has created a patch which fixes A LOT of these bugs. This is pretty much the only patch that you need if you want to keep your game as vanilla as possible.
- Go to the SilentPatch Page[gtaforums.com] and download DDraw Component and the GTA Vice City version of the patch called SilentPatchVC.
- Extract both the zip files onto your desktop.
- Copy all the contents from both zip files onto the main directory of GTA Vice City. If asked to overwrite anything, allow it. You can open the main directory folder by selecting GTA Vice City in your Steam library with right click and going to Properties>Local Files>Browse.
- You have now successfully patched the game and gotten rid of a lot of bugs.
Step 2: RivaTuner Statistics Server
Grand Theft Auto Vice City was intended to be ran at 30 FPS. Well its 2020 now and 30 FPS ain’t gonna cut it anymore. If you uncap the FPS however, the game will seriously break by making cars stop dead on their track when not accelerating and the player randomly taking massive damage when dropping from heights. This can be easily fixed by capping the FPS ourselves to 60 FPS with RTSS.
- Go to the RivaTuner Statistic Server Download Page[www.guru3d.com], scroll all the way down and download the latest stable release. DO NOT get the beta versions if you want to have a smooth experience.
- Extract the installer and run it. Proceed as instructed through the installation until you’re done.
- Launch the program. You can find the program by navigating to its install folder or by searching it through Windows’ search function.
- Instead of modifying the Global settings, I’d actually advice you turn off Global settings so it doesn’t mess with other games and instead add GTA Vice City by using the green “Add” button at the bottom. This way you can apply the FPS limit to GTA Vice City only.
- Select GTA Vice City in the menu and to the area on the right you can set the Framerate Limit to 60. Do not mistake Framerate Limit with Frametime Limit. You must only modify the Framerate Limit, NOT the Frametime Limit.
- You don’t need to mess with the other settings unless you know what you’re doing and you want to customize more settings to your likings.
- After you set the Framerate Limit to 60 FPS, boot up GTA Vice City, go to the Display Settings and disable Frame Limiter.
- GTA Vice City will now run stably at 60 FPS capped without any issues that come with uncapped FPS.
Conclusion
After you’re done with these 2 steps, you’ll be able to experience this legendary game vanilla style without any hindrances and without any extra unnecessary mods that attempt to “improve” the game’s style or gameplay.
Have fun driving fancy cars and blasting 80s music tracks on the radio!