For GTA III – The Definitive Edition, set everything to Ultra and then change three settings: car Body Reflections to Screen Space, Cloud Quality down a step, and Headlight (Vehicle Light) Quality to Low. Those three are where this remaster loses its frame rate. Players who changed them on Steam report going from 50-70 fps with drops to a steady 144.
That matters because this is a light game that runs badly. Rockstar’s Steam page asks for only a GTX 760 2 GB or R9 280 3 GB at minimum and a GTX 970 or RX 570 4 GB recommended, yet an RTX 2070 Super owner in a 2023 Steam thread barely hit 30 fps on the highest settings. Lowering everything barely helped. Lowering the right three did.
The three settings that cost the most
Body Reflections (car paint): The options are Cube Map, Planar, Low Quality Planar and Screen Space. GameGPU’s settings review explains why Planar hurts: it mirrors and re-renders the whole scene for every reflective surface. Screen Space only reflects what’s already on screen, so it’s far cheaper and still looks dynamic.
Headlight Quality: On the higher steps, every vehicle light casts shadows. In a city full of traffic, that’s a lot of shadows, and it’s the setting the Steam fix turned all the way down.
Cloud Quality: Material, Volume Effect and Volume Effect: Maximum. The volumetric options make clouds look fuller, and the Steam players who fixed their frame rate changed this one too.
Best settings, by PC
| Setting | Most PCs | Low-end (GTX 970 / RX 570 class) | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body Reflections | Screen Space | Screen Space | Planar re-renders the scene: the biggest cost |
| Headlight Quality | Low | Low | Higher steps cast shadows from every car light |
| Cloud Quality | Volume Effect | Material | Lowering it was part of the Steam fix |
| Distance Detail | Far | Medium | Big visual gain, big performance cost |
| Shadow Quality | High | Medium | Uses a lot of video memory |
| Texture Quality | High | High | Ultra is almost identical to High |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16x | 16x | About 3% of fps at most |
| Reflection Quality | Low | Low | Minimal visible difference |
| City Glow Effect | Low | Off | Minimal difference between Off and High |
| DLSS (NVIDIA RTX only) | Quality | Not available on these cards | Upscaling for more fps |
Sources: GameGPU (what each setting does and costs), Steam community (the three-setting fix).
GameGPU measured anisotropic filtering at about 2.93% of fps, so 16x costs a couple of frames at most and you can keep it maxed. It also found Ultra textures almost identical to High, so High is free memory back on a 4 GB card.
Still slow? Try DirectX 12
The same Steam thread suggests adding -dx12 to the game’s launch options (Steam → right-click → Properties). The player who posted it says it improves performance but can make some textures look bluish at night. Try it after the three settings above, not before, and remove it if the night scenes bother you.
Limiting the frame rate
Several searches ask how to cap GTA III DE’s frame rate. We couldn’t confirm the current menu names for the in-game limiter across patches, so we won’t list them. The dependable route is the frame-rate limit in your graphics driver’s per-game settings, set to your monitor’s refresh rate. A cap keeps frame times even and stops a 2001 game from running your card flat out.
What we couldn’t confirm
The settings descriptions come from GameGPU’s review at launch in November 2021, and the frame rate reports come from players, not from our own testing. The game has been patched since, so some option names may have shifted. The fps gains in the Steam thread are one player’s numbers on a Ryzen 9 5900X and RTX 2080 Super, confirmed by another player. Your result will depend on your own CPU and card.
If your card is the real limit, our GPU upgrade calculator shows what a step up costs in euros, and our Evil Within PC fixes cover another older game that misbehaves on new PCs.
Our pick
Our pick: Ultra, then Body Reflections to Screen Space, Headlight Quality to Low and Cloud Quality one step down, with 16x anisotropic filtering left on. Add a driver frame cap at your refresh rate.
Skip it if you’re on a GTX 970-class card: start from the low-end column instead, with Distance Detail on Medium, because GameGPU flags it as a big performance cost.
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