How to easily improve textures, performance and restore songs

In this guide, I will show you how you can make your Vice City "definitive edition" actually definitive. All of this is very easy and quick to do and I highly recommend you also do it.

Performance

First, we will start with a simple performance fix. From my personal experience, lowering settings and turning on DLSS doesn't help that much. What I did find though is that you can set your game to launch with DirectX12 and that helps a lot. My game went from stuttering 45 fps on average to a more stable 57-60 fps (with a 60fps cap). All you need to do is:

1. Right-click on Vice City in your Steam library and click "properties"
2. In the "General" tab launch options copy and paste "-dx12"
3. Close and you're done!

This will make your game launch with Dx12 rather than Dx11. This might not help everyone depending on your pc setup but this worked for me so it might work for you too.

Textures

We all know some models in this definitive edition look awful but you can fix that with a couple of simple mods. Before you do that you need to make a mods folder in your game folder. You can do this by finding your game folder first. For me it was:

Steam/steamapps/common/GTA Vice City- The Definitive Edition.

Now what you need to do is simply create a mods folder. Go to:

GameFace/Content/Paks/

Now right click, create a new folder and name it "~mods". It is VERY important that you include the special character (~) otherwise it won't work. Then you are done! Now for adding the actual mods. These are simple re-textures and won't change the actual models so therefore very easy to install. Here are some of my favourites from Nexus Mods.

Retextured Tommy Vercetti face mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/grandtheftautothetrilogy/mods/77?tab=description

Fixed Ken Rosenberg

https://www.nexusmods.com/grandtheftautothetrilogy/mods/35

Lance Vance Fix

https://www.nexusmods.com/grandtheftautothetrilogy/mods/220

Better Road Textures for Vice City

https://www.nexusmods.com/grandtheftautothetrilogy/mods/71?tab=description


All you need to do is copy the .paks files for each mod to your: GTA Vice City Definitive Edition/GameFace/Content/Paks/~Mods/ folder and you are done!

Restoring removed songs

We all know some of the best songs are missing from all GTA definitive edition games due to their licences expiring and Rockstar not wanting to spend money to renew them. Some of the missing songs include:

Emotion 98.3: Wow - Kate Bush

V-Rock: Bark at the Moon - Ozzy Osbourne

Fever 105: Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' - Michael Jackson

Flash FM: Billie Jean - Michael Jackson, Running With The Night - Lionel Richie

Radio Espantoso: Aguanile - Irakere

Wildstyle: Rockit - Herbie Hancock, Looking for the Perfect Beat - Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, The Smurf - Tyrone Brunson

But good news, you can easily restore these songs with a simple mod. All you need to do is just simply, once again, copy the .paks file to your: GTA Vice City Definitive Edition/GameFace/Content/Paks/~Mods/ folder and you are done. Below is a link for the mod. This mod has included lost songs to all 3 games but just download the one meant for GTA Vice City.

https://www.nexusmods.com/grandtheftautothetrilogy/mods/681?tab=description

Done!

Hope this helps and improves your experience as much as it did for me. If you have any questions then just ask and if this guide helped you please make sure you like it and rate it as it helps reach other people like you! Happy shooting!

[Marco Champolo]

Havent played the OG Vice City in over a decade. Restoring all the songs should make it a blast to play this again. Rockstar removing the songs by Kate Bush and Michael Jackson was a sin.
Thanks for your guide, it's a treasure!

[Evan]

awesome thankyou so much

[2dopeboyz]

thanks