[all info on topic] FPS dropping heavily during rains, and slightly with explosions/fire

[edualc]

FPS dropping heavily during rains, and slightly with explosions/fire

How it occurs (when):

1. the weather is changed to raining
2. I blow up a car (most of the times with M4, non-stop shooting til I see it blown up - I find it fun)
3. a firing happens, such as: I throw a molotov (oh boy.. how that is painful to see my FPS drop when I do that) and use flamethrower (not as much as worse as when I throw a molotov)

 

Observations made by me regarding of the issue when it occurs:

• Regarding 2nd Issue above: something I noticed but not sure if it is all the time, it appears the FPS drops usually depends of how close the explosion was to my Claude, when I blow up like an helicopter, FPS also drops, but doesn't feel as much of a slow down as it does when it is with a car near me (for being far in a vertical way), also when I blow up a car far from me with M4, the FPS drops are lower as far as I noticed.
• Regarding 1st and 3rd Issue above: What i noticed besides distance (but of my camera I presume because when I start a new game, the scene where the car in the back is burning up is even painful to wait with that sound - which sometimes looks like it's cracking but rarely happens that), is the amount of particle effects being rendered in-game near my player's camera or the player itself depending of the distance (like mentioned in the 2nd Issue), when the weather is changed to raining, it eventually starts getting worse (but stops at one point, it's just the transition of the weather then it stabilizes in an awful FPS drop instead of keep getting worse).

 

What I have tried to fix the issues:

Initially it was just pure poor performance, but then I changed the audio hardware (to Miles  settings to see which performed best, but even though it solved the poor performance of the game in general, it still drops my FPS when the weather starts to rain, or i blow up a car/throw fire with molotov/flamethrower (molotov seems to be dropping more FPS than flamethrower though I think).

 

- Installed so far:

1. frame limiter to a default of 60
2. Silent Patch
3. largeaddress patch for the game to recognize the 64bits system with 4GB RAM+

• I don't got d8d9.dll installed because apparently it just plainly makes like the menu exists but I can't see it, and if I manage to start it up (which I did), a lot of objects can't be seen including NPCs and the player - though I do see some very few objects in the map

Important mentioning, though not sure if relevant, when I'm just driving at a high speed, sometimes it seems the FPS also drops but not at the point that it feels like the game is playing in slow motion, but you can feel it's going slower instead of faster because of the FPS drops.

 

Game version: Classic GTA III with v1.1 Patch, CD-ROM from around ~2006-2008 (kept it stored in a box along with another of my old PC game), files indicate to be around 2002 August (not sure if that's relevant) and it was v1.0 but after I've been searching for solutions, I patched it to v1.1 with the official Rockstar Games download url.

 

Regarding hardware, my computer hardware is all from around 2009-2011, which meets way more than the game requirements (according to this website recommended in this section to check it), and since I mentioned RAM memory above, I do have 4GB RAM.

 

Let me know if there's something else that I should put on the topic to make it easier for others to help me. Thank you for your time so far for reading this.

Edited August 8, 2022 by edualc
Initially put what I tried and game version, though I edited to add more details to the topic to make it easier for others to help me by following the standard procedures recommended in this section.