GTA V Vehicle LOD Chain: How L0-L4 Work and Why They Matter

Every GTA V vehicle ships with multiple levels of detail (LODs). The high-poly LOD0 only renders when the camera is close; lower-poly LODs swap in at distance. The LOD chain is one of the most performance-critical aspects of vehicle modding - skipping or poorly tuning the chain causes server-wide performance issues when many vehicles are on screen. This post documents the LOD chain per the modding-forum and GTAMods wiki references.

How many LODs and what they are called

From the modding-forum LOD models guide: GTA V vehicles use five levels of detail, named L0 through L4.

• L0 - the highest-quality version. "Loaded when the car is being driven or right in front of the player in-game."
• L1, L2, L3, L4 - "less detailed to improve performance, as many details would not be visible from higher distances."

Distance thresholds (defaults)

Per the modding-forum reference, the default distances at which each LOD takes over are:

• L1 around 15m
• L2 around 30m
• L3 around 60m or 70m
• L4 around 120m or 140m

These distances are tunable per-vehicle via visual settings, but the defaults above are the baseline most stock GTA V vehicles use.

File structure: _hi.yft and .yft

The LODs are split across two YFT files per the same reference: "Cars for GTA V always have a _hi.yft file for the highest LOD (L0) and a normal .yft file for L1-L4."

So a typical car ships as:

• carname.yft - contains L1, L2, L3, L4
• carname_hi.yft - contains L0 only
• carname.ytd - the texture dictionary (shared across all LODs)

The naming convention is fixed: name.yft exports L1-L4, name_hi.yft exports L0 only. Tools like Zmodeler3 follow this naming when generating the LOD export.

Recommended polygon budgets per LOD

From the modding-forum reference (and consistent with what stock GTA V vehicles typically run):

• L0: 60k - 120k polygons
• L1: 20k - 30k polygons
• L2: 10k - 15k polygons
• L3: 5k - 10k polygons
• L4: 500 to 1000 polygons

Each step is roughly 50% of the previous step. The L4 number being 500-1000 is intentional - at the distance where L4 takes over, the car is the size of a few pixels on screen. There is no benefit to detail at that scale.

Why the LOD chain matters for servers

If a custom car ships with only L0 and the lower LODs are missing or copied from L0, every car instance on screen renders at full poly count. With 30 cars on screen at a busy intersection, the GPU is rendering 1.8 million to 3.6 million polys for vehicles alone (at 60-120k each), instead of the much lower combined count when the chain steps down properly.

This is the root cause of "this car pack tanks my server's FPS." The LOD chain, not the L0 poly count, is usually the culprit.

Hierarchy note

Per the modding-forum reference: "For cars, the chassis is its only child element, while other items are child objects of the chassis." The LOD geometry organizes underneath the chassis dummy in the hierarchy that exporters expect.

Sources

• Modding Forum: LOD Models guide
• GTAMods Wiki: LOD