
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. This is because (I think) the new renderer is building a cache. But it's important to note that, on your first launch, the game might be even laggier than before.

Navigate to the Display tab and note down the number next to Display Memory Press the Windows key + R to open the Run window and type in dxdiag. Find out how much display memory you have.Copy d3d9.dll from the \x32 folder into your GTA 4 directory.How to fix GTA 4 performance issues on PC If you still want to give it a go, follow the steps below to the letter. 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. I can't promise anything, such is the temperamental nature of playing old, abandoned videogames on a modern PC. 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. Related: Grand Theft Auto 4 Should Be Next In Line For A Remaster You need a Vulkan-compatible graphics card to use this fix, but if you do, your woes could be over. So to make it stop, you have to force the game to use a different, more efficient renderer-specifically Vulkan.

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no tech expert, so I might be getting some details wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the stuttering is caused by an outdated and/or poorly implemented Direct3D/DirectDraw renderer. 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.
