Now it has been almost 20 years since GTA Vice City was first released. But hardcore fans of this game still love it and play it on their modern computers. It was originally released for Windows XP, Vista and 7. Now that we have Windows 11, gamers like to play this game on their new Windows 11 computers.
But if you try to launch GTA Vice City from its original DVD, then it gives an error – “Grand Theft Auto VC requires at least DirectX version 8.1”. But the thing is that most of the computers running on Windows 11 today have DirectX 12 already. So this error makes the people mostly confused.
The problem is that in the newer versions starting from DirectX 10, a component of DirectX – DirectPlay was deprecated. Older games that were designed using DirectPlay think that DirectX is either not installed or an older version has been installed.
In order to fix this problem we can enable DirectPlay in the following manner:
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog. Type appwiz.cpl in the Run dialog and press Enter.
- In the “Programs and Features” window, click on Turn Windows Features on or off.
- In the small window that opens up, select Legacy Components and then DirectPlay.
- Click on the OK button to save the settings. It takes a few seconds before this component is enabled.
- Now you an launch GTA Vice City on your Windows 11 PC without any problem.
There are some mods that you would want to use for running GTA Vice City on your Windows 11 PC. For example, there is wide-screen fix from https://thirteenag.github.io/wfp which offers open-source widescreen fixes for many games.
Alternatively, you can run GTA Vice City in a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3. In addition, you can also download the latest updated version from Rockstar Games which might have support for new versions of DirectX.