Bottom line: One YouTuber has discovered a two-part solution that greatly improves the in-game performance of each of the three games in Rockstar's new GTA Trilogy for PC. Not all of the workarounds are ideal, especially if you've spent money on a high refresh rate monitor, but they should at least make the games bearable until Rockstar gets around to rolling out a patch or two.
Rockstar Games would no doubt love to hit the reset button on Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. The bundle of remasters officially launched on November 11 but heavy demand prompted the company to take down its Games Launcher for "maintenance" shortly after. It returned a day later, but gamers discovered that Rockstar had pulled the trilogy in order to remove "files unintentionally included in these versions."
It's nearly a week later and while the game is available to purchase on PC once again, there are still plenty of issues that need ironing out. Fortunately, some workarounds have already emerged courtesy of the gaming community.
First, you'll want to lock your display's refresh rate to 60Hz and activate VSync.
Joker Productions also recommends switching the games' default API from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12. You can do so in the Rockstar Launcher under settings -> launch arguments and entering "-dx12." This will need to be done for each of the three games in the trilogy.
With any luck, Rockstar will patch some of the performance issues and wonky AI in the near future, but for now, these manual changes should at least allow early adopters to play the games without any major performance issues.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition retails for $59.99 across all major platforms, including the Nintendo Switch.