After a long trial and error. I got the right mix of cars player skins traffic mods and awesome fps rates.

I am still using the vanilla lcpd cars for the ai police and am considering changing their car to a previous model i used to use. But, with previous issues with memory and textures i am afraid to touch anything at this point

As it is right now i have no texture loss. Little to no lag and few crashes

Specs

Intel dual core 2.0 hz

4 gb of ram

Nvidia gtx 550ti

Graphics are set to medium and the traffic is set at 10....

Gotta be honest I'm shocked at how nice this gaming is working...

If I understand you correctly; you're asking if you should install car mods, but only if it will continue to run smooth?

Try installing one car only first, see how it runs. If it still runs good, then go for another car, etc...

If you put a modded car in, and the game doesn't run good, then you should keep the unmodded cars. Remember to back-up your original vehicles.img before installing vehicle mods, that way you can go back to the game's original vehicles if you need to.

The only advice I can give to maintain performance, is look at the car model file size.

You can get some nice high detail, low poly models out there.

The best that spring to mind are f5544's Driver San Francisco conversions which are available from the files section under his profile....

http://www.lcpdfr.co...er/15429-f5544/ << Here

basically, the bigger the file size/more complex the model, the more intense it is going to be to run.

And frankly, a lot of car models are really poorly optimised.

Also, I use this...

http://www.gta4-mods...rride-12-f15452

Which gives you a seperate IMG file to put your car mods into so you dont have to mess about with the vanilla vehicles.img and makes switching stuff out, and knowing what you have replaced really easy.

Edited August 11, 201213 yr by kevmscotland

Thx guys. Ive got 3 modded cruisers in the game. All ai police and civi drive the vanilla gta vehicles....im gonna try the low poly for the ai officers.