GTA3 for my PC is running slowly

Factual Questions
1

My roommate and I put our money together and bought Grand Theft Auto 3 for personal computer.

GTA3 will not work on my roommate’s computer because he is having trouble downloading DirectX version 8.1 which is nevessary for running GTA3.

The installation was successful on my PC, a Gateway with Windows ME :frowning: & a 20 gig hard drive. The program runs but is somewhat slow and choppy at times.

Only half my hard drive is full.

I am an expert with certain programs and I know some programming languages, but I know very little about computers.

Is there anything I could do to improve the game speed without buying a better PC?

Thank you very much ahead of time for any help/advice.

2

What are the specs on your computer? What video settings are you running GTA3 at?

Assuming you are running at the lowest settings on GTA, I know of a few things that may help. You can copy the audio files from the CD to your hard drive (check the website to get the directory locations) which is supposed to improve performance on some computers. You can also defragment your hard drive, which may help. (go to My Computer, right click on your hard drive and select Properties, then the Tools tab). Also, download the newest drivers for your video and sound cards.

3

What kind of video card do you have? GTA is very graphics intensive, it was very choppy on my 32 MB ATI card.

4

In GTA itself go to the display menu in Options/Display setup. First make sure ‘trails’ is set to off; they slow the whole thing down horribly. Also drop the resolution a notch and lower the draw distance. That will probably help a bit.

5

No specs necessary…problem solved after hardrive defrag and turning ‘trails’ off.

Thanx Giraffe and Dagon

6

That trails thingy does slow it down a bunch. I have a bitchin’ 'puter, and mine can’t render those trails worth a damn.

2100XP processor,
512MB RAM
30GB HD
GeForce3 video card