So in my last video i said this now i m not talking about gta iv s performance that has and likely always will be an issue thankfully several of you commented on that video correcting me telling me about dxvk a project which adds a vulkan based translation layer to directx and games gta iv is a directx game. So it works with that at first i was sceptical most of the time i find performance fixes generally don t work and they re a waste of time i was very wrong.

My pc is nothing special in fact it s pretty outdated at this stage and struggles to run games made after i typically get a lot of stutters in newer games due to my cpu and my gtx isn t good enough to play at higher settings like it was years ago gta iv was no exception it ran but stutters were very frequent no matter what i did. So i put it down to my pc simply not being enough for this dreadful year old port. Anyway you guys told me about dxvk and i decided to give it a try let s take a look at the performance with and without it so you can see just how much it improves gta iv all tests here were done with max settings at p on the latest steam version of gta.

Iv so the first test will involve standing still in the middle of star junction with an unlocked frame rate in the vanilla game the performance is hovering around frames per second we re not moving or doing anything and there s no action going on this is just liberty city ambience with dxvk our performance is dramatically increased. We go from frames per second to frames per second which slowly decreases as more vehicles appear on screen we start to hover around to frames per second.

Now the next test with an unlocked frame rate will be flying across the map this isn t a scenario. You l find yourself in during normal gameplay but the difference in performance is still quite large in the vanilla game we jump from the fps range to around while flying through the city however we are getting a lot of stutters while doing so every time the frame time graph has massive jumps like this the game is stuttering heavily. But with dxvk not only is our average frame rate much higher almost always being over frames per second the stutters aren t nearly as bad as they were in the vanilla.

Game however in my opinion you shouldn t be playing with an unlocked frame rate not unless you re getting over frames per second constantly and you have a display which supports variable refresh rates ideally when playing a game like this you want to lock your frame rate if you don t the constant changes in frame rate will make the game feel like it s stuttering as the frame time can change dramatically depending on the scene for my pc fps is the perfect frame rate to lock the game to lock my fps i m using rivatuner statistic server. This allows you to lock the frame rate of any d application and in my experience provides much more consistent frame times over in game frame limiter solutions.

So with our game locked at frames per second we should expect a nice smooth experience with a steady frame time. Right with the vanilla game. No not really if you look at the frame time graph there s constant stuttering and our frame rate keeps dropping making the experience feels absolutely awful with dxvk we get one tiny stutter as we leave the building and then one big stutter as we start running that s likely caused by the fact that the game has only been launched after that we have zero performance issues the game is running at a consistent frames per second with absolutely flawless frame times.

So what about driving as expected the vanilla game isn t a fun experience at all the frame rate keeps dropping and the stuttering is honestly unbearable there s constant micro stutters as seen in the frame time graph and occasionally a big stutter this basically never stops dxvk is absolutely perfectly smooth a constant frames per second with perfect frame times.

As usual the vanilla game is absolutely abysmal the frame rate isn t steady the stuttering is constant. And it s really not good enough for such an old game dxvk is near perfect. There s some very small stutters occasionally however. I honestly didn t even notice them aside from their presence in the frame time graph flying around the map this fast is also something you l never do in actual gameplay either.

So i think you get the point dxvk provides insane performance improvements to gta iv. And it s basically necessary to run this game on pc without dxvk you l get constant stuttering no matter what you do even on pcs which should be capable of running this year old game dxvk is a necessity so let me show you how to install it and set it up.

Installing dxvk is fairly simple but just some quick notes i ve only installed dxvk on the complete edition of gta iv which is the latest version on steam the version of dxvk used in this video was version which is the current latest version at the time of recording to install dxvk you l need zip to open the archive it comes in i l leave a link to zip below you don t need any other mods to get dxvk working. So if you just want to install dxvk and then play gta iv you can do that however the pc version does have more issues aside from performance including inferior graphics when compared to the console version i have a video covering these differences which i l link on the screen now before you do install dxvk go into your graphics settings in gta iv and take note of how much video memory you have i have gb with my gtx that s shown as mb type your video memory value down somewhere as you l need it later lastly installation methods might change in the future so be sure to check the description or pinned comment to see if anything has been changed since i uploaded this video. Anyway let s get to installing dxvk step download the latest version of dxvk from the link in the description step open the gz archive with zip once opened open the tar archive inside step open the dxvk folder inside that archive then open the x folder step copy everything from the x folder into your gta iv folder this is the folder where gtaiv exe is located. Okay before you leave this video that s not all dxvk is installed but for some reason this causes the game to think you have very little video memory when the game thinks you haven t got enough video memory it won t let you increase settings so to fix this you have to force the game to think you have more video memory you can do this inside a file called commandline txt gta iv doesn t have one by default. So we l create one so step inside the gta iv folder create a new txt file called commandline txt step open commandline txt with any text editor and type the following availablevidmem followed by the video memory value you took down earlier so for me that was mb after that go to a new line and enter noprecache once you have both lines like shown here save the file and that s it dxvk is now installed and gta iv should run a whole lot better compared to before if you need any help feel free to join my discord server hopefully myself or someone else can help you out anyway that is finally all if you found this video helpful be sure to give it a like if you like gta modding videos don t forget to subscribe as well thanks for watching and i l catch you later.