Have Rockstar announced a second patch yet?

[chngdman]

The more I think about it, the more Tim Sweeney is right: We are leaving hardware rendering and going back to software rendering, keeping DX/OGL for legacy games only. It makes sense why rockstar said "built to last" and also omitted a hardware accelerated feature like AA

[flyer2359]

Me thinks there will be no more patches.

 

 

 

I'm willing to take bets

same here R* just didn't try with the PC version this time

[chngdman]

I was thinking it over some more and I bet the next patch won't be announced, we'll just be happy when we see an update. They HAD to announce a patch in the beginning, they just had to. But now, I bet it will be something they leave for us to discover and discuss. It is an auto updater, so it makes sense to not have to announce it until it goes - especially with how long it takes to get through M$ (I read a lot of complaints about this wait while I was lurking for fixes for problems I had that were my hardware).

[thales100]

 

This pic below, It's not as bad when you are moving in-game (screens dont do justice to movement), both the blur and the non blurred game itself I mean, except the blur reduces "rolling pixels" (like seen on top of those traffic lights in the farther clip in your pic, covered in mine ), or at least makes them less noticable)

 

See the orange building example above the blue truck? I know a lot of the edges I pointed out would be fine (and possibly better) with high level aa, but those shadows on that building, I think they would look f*cked with AA  rather than nice and smooth with that blur on it. Best I could do, it's probably not exact (my blur seems a bit to strong, maybe, but had to to kinda feel like the P gives me in game)

 

It's all about preference but those things I point out are the things that keep me from using the game without P! And the high-speed effects P brings <3 The rest of it is nice, but those edges I point out, and the trees kill it for me without P after so long playing with P

 

 

Yeah its all about preferences, nice post , ill keep my fingers far from P.

Edited January 14, 2009 by thales100

[LanceLongstiff]

Do you really think that new patch will change anything?

No, but it's the best chance there is to see this game running as it should. It's either that or shelve it for 3 years.

 

A patch could do it if they put the effort in.

[noVa]

blah bur just looks horrible, messes my eyes up to hard to focus on things!

 

but the backlight in this screen is failing so certain colours flicker - bring on my lovely new 22" 1920x1080 screen

[LanceLongstiff]

yeah, the blur is just as bad as the jaggies

[ExitiumMachina]

I'd take that bet if I thought you'd pay up.

 

There were at least three patches for the PS3 version, so it's obvious the PC will get at least another couple.

Oh, I didn't realize it was so OBVIOUS. PS3 sold about 4 million copes and they got a standard release. Definitely comparable to a half broken PC release. Also, that R* Toronto guy/girl doesn't stop talking about the second patch. IIRC that person was very quick to announce the first one, why hold the info for the second? What good did the first patch do, anyway? Oh yeah, I can bowl now, how ultra useful.

 

Silly me.

Not all people had bowling issues, IIRC. And you kinda DO need that to function in the very beginning to even play (the story at least).

 

You can expect them to announce the first patch that fast after the lash that was going on that I read about when looking for solutions that may have already been covered. The game is not half broken, it runs great on my bare minimum system (as many saw us all bicker over in the "f*cked us" topic).

 

Here, listen to me talk like a dork and show off my performancez:

 

 

1.86ghz core 2 duo.

2 gigs ram.

HD3850, 38% utilized by game.

 

Only way I can produce most issues is to turn my ram below 533mhz (ddr2/266x2) - any lower than that, I come to issues

 

 

" We will support GTA 4 on PC in a long term"

 

Yep Jack, I remember this, it was even in gaming news It's because IV is going to expand Bohan to include North Bohan <3

 

They said they will support for the long term, knowing they will be developing on this platform for the long term anyhow, yea?

"Who's the c*nt now?"

 

rofl!

[FullMetal]

chngdman: Thanks alot for reading and providing some help... but you are too much of a computer pro to me, and I'm too 'green' when it comes to computers. I only know the basics...

 

And alt/tab out of the game and check the cores? So you mean I have to alt tab + ctrl/alt/delete and check the preformance on my CPU? Well, I'll try that. I'll do it when the game is starting up and once the game is running (and make a comparison ofcourse).

 

About the resolution: My monitor only allows me to use the resolution I posted. I'm quite satisfied with that resolution at the moment (in other games I use that resolution & max everything out... which I like alot. On top of that, I haven't been bothered buying a new monitor since I'm really satisfied with this one... on top of that, I hate widescreen monitors for some reason. Especially when it comes to gaming.)

 

And running in higher resolutions makes it run better? What the f*ck? Although I believe you, this sounds very unbelievable... it has always been the opposite, but GTAIV/R* have to do it differently...

 

Yet again, thanks for your help!

[Dumbas]

I was quite shocked to find that, when I went from 720 to 1920x1080 it actually ran better at higher resolutions.

 

At 720 it shuttered and stuttered like an old West Virginia farmboy doin his sister.

 

 

[livilaNic]

I know we will probably never have AA in GTA 4, but i could dream about it.

 

I'll be in that dream with ya buddy (don't worry I won't be fondling).

 

It's just to bad. Not sure why they couldn't add the support for DX10. Bioshock and a few other games have done so. If only for the AA I would switch to Vista in a heart beat. Would just be my all time favorite game to be immersed in. Even though I'm immersed already. Just would be more so with AA.

 

My eyes they bleed!

 

 

[chngdman]

Hey fullmetal! It's no problem, I hope to find some help for everyone, I've enjoyed the game and you guys mostly have better boxes than me, anything to help!

 

Yes, you got it right, tab out and Ctrl+Alt+Del, but when you do, right click the GTA IV.exe entry in the Processes tab and then choose the affinity option you see there (it could be a slide-out on the menu, and it could also be a pop-up with check boxes) and just give GTA 2 cores - if this helps, that would be awesome!

[Denieru]

I was quite shocked to find that, when I went from 720 to 1920x1080 it actually ran better at higher resolutions.

 

At 720 it shuttered and stuttered like an old West Virginia farmboy doin his sister.

That's what I found as well! The lower I put my resolution, the lower my FPS... real strange. It kind of gets better again at 800x600, but my max resolution is still better than that.

[x8681150]

lets get this straight,,,,there will not be a 2nd patch soon!why?? well first this game was not intended(or coded) to be run at high settings.what rockstar had in mind and that's why they coded this game that way was the game to be run at low resolution settings(like the consoles),but they made the mistake of putting the options(future intended)of having the grafixs on high and that's like offering a kid a ferrari and then giving him a corolla,now everybody intends on running this game on high and if you try the game runs like crap!!(fps)and then we say this game its a piece of @@##!!! i suppose the 2nd patch will be available when the next generation cards(1-2gb)become more widely available,,for now we are stuck on playing this game on med or low to be able to get decent fps,,remember they said it ,the settings were intended for the future ,so they feel they have no reason of why put a patch so soon,this game has too much interaction in it,allmost everyting is destructible,,even you can pick cigarettes up from the floor(dont know why)and that takes a lot of memory,so you have to scarify grafix performance for that, and they just did not go together with the technology that was available when they coded this game at the time !!,thats why they were not expecting gamers to go so crazy about having the settings all on high , so in other words,what you have is what you get!!! jus look at this interview ,, http://pc.ign.com/articles/936/936304p1.html,in this interview this is what rockstar had to say:: devil.gif devil.gif Rockstar Talks GTA IV Technical Problems

by Charles Onyett

◄ Previous 1 2 3 Next ► December 5, 2008 - Since the release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC earlier this week, users across the Internet, from the Steam forums to our own, have been reporting technical problems with the game. Issues range from poor performance with more than adequate hardware to the more severe, such as textures not loading or the game failing to boot up at all. To get a sense of what's going on behind the scenes at developer Rockstar, we spoke to several representatives via conference call.

 

On the phone were a number of Rockstar employees, including Lead QA Arthur Chiang, Technical Director Kevin Hoare, and VP of Development Jeronimo Barrera.

 

One thing to note that Rockstar passed along to us: a patch is in the works, currently in the approval process at Microsoft. According to Rockstar, it's necessary for games that have Games for Windows Live infrastructure to pass through the company before being released. Beyond that, no precise time of release was given. Also, a Rockstar rep let us know that the Steam version of the game initially had a problem with not downloading properly to users' computers, creating an issue related to textures. The problem has since been addressed, says Rockstar. Steam is also offering the opportunity for refunds, something detailed over at Voodoo Extreme.

 

If you're currently experiencing problems with the game, this is a good place to start looking for answers. GN: Just to start out could you give us a sense of how widespread the problem actually is because it's difficult to tell from looking at message boards.

 

Kevin Hoare: I guess that's really hard to determine. The only thing we really have to go on in that regard is support calls we've been getting which have been quite low or as expected, which I think is roughly around one percent…It seems like maybe these forum posters are the more outspoken percentage of the players. That's really the only thing we have to go on as far as numbers go.

 

IGN: What sort of issues are you hearing about, both expected and unexpected?

 

Kevin Hoare: We're on the forums ourselves monitoring the issues people are having. A lot of these issues obviously we haven't seen in our testing and we're working to reproduce them and find workarounds for those issues. Many of the issues that we've found so far haven't been a direct result of the game itself but rather configurations of driver installations or power management software causing issues, various things of that sort.

 

IGN: Can you talk about what you're working on right now, like a patch?

 

Kevin Hoare: We've never stopped working on the game, we're working on it every day. We haven't had the typical break after it's gone gold. We're continually working on improvements, we're working on a patch right now.

 

IGN: Can you say what the patch will address and what sort of timetable there might be?

 

Kevin Hoare: We've done some improvements to the video editor and the rendering engine for the replay editor. We've added, again from feedback from the forums, we initially didn't support direct-input controller devices and people seemed to want that, so we added support for direct-input devices. I think there was an issue with bowling…

 

Arthur Chiang: We read that some people with sensitive mice were having trouble with the bowling mini-game so we looked into that more and we've got a fix for that. There's a bunch of little UI tweaks because we've come a long way in our video editing prowess and we've been slowly increasing the user functionality to make things easier for what we want to do with it.

 

Jeronimo Barrera: Let's not beat around the bush here. There's a lot of noise like this game doesn't run at all or there's missing textures and everything else. From what we've gathered a lot of those problems are either out of date drivers or we don't support that type of card or you're underspecced or whatever, it's always a combination of one of those things, it's not necessarily that we don't know what we're doing because obviously we put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of test into this. From what we did and from going through certification with Microsoft and our external QA process we didn't run into the amount of problems that the boards seemed to be saying there are. I know that Nvidia and ATI are constantly…I think they're releasing new drivers pretty soon.

 

(ATI drivers are coming next Wednesday, according to Rockstar. Nvidia drivers are up now)

 

Obviously when you start talking about high-end PC games people want to tweak with their drivers and everything else and we've found some situations where people have modified their drivers by going to sites where you can customize drivers, and we've found problems with that. We're seeing some of the things that people are complaining about but they're so peripheral of the target audience.

 

IGN: Then why do you think this has reached the level of proliferation through the online gaming media as it has because a lot of games are released for the PC and they all have technical issues with various hardware setups but this one seems to be more prominent than most. If it is just an expected volume of user problems, as you say, then why the furor?

 

Jeronimo Barrera: I think we have pretty passionate fans and they're going to let us know when they're unhappy with something. We're trying to address every issue we can whether it's through our support line or going to forums, we're constantly scanning to make sure we aren't missing something. Obviously we want this to run on everybody's machine. I think these guys can explain a little bit more like what separates us from other games. What we're doing is really cutting edge, there's a lot of stuff going on onscreen.

 

IGN: Before we get into that, a few questions about general graphics options. Why can't you actually through the graphics menu adjust AA (anti-aliasing), turn off shadows, and why is there a resource usage limitation?

 

Kevin Hoare: Early on we decided we weren't going to support DirectX 10. We were just going to work on increasing the visual quality with what we had with DirectX 9. If we had DirectX 10 support we could have had the AA in there, but we don't have any. The shadows, at least from the forums and what I'm seeing, I think a lot of people don't understand that the shadow density is only designed for a certain type of light in the game. In the daytime there's a general shadow that covers the entire world. That is hooked up directly to the video mode. It scales automatically with resolution. So the higher the resolution you set the game, the higher your shadow, mirrors, water, reflection, everything automatically scales.

 

We had all those options available and we found that people were confused by so many options so we wound up merging them into the video mode.

 

IGN: So they're just all merged into the resolution? Ok so…

 

Jeronimo Barrera: I wish we could go back in time and name some of the settings a little bit differently because when people are playing it on medium, it's actually, I forget how many times higher resolution it is up from the console version, but it's quite significant.

 

Kevin Hoare: A lot of the settings when I was originally putting them in were based off of what I could actually squeeze into system memory and video memory. In some cases we're just seeing 2 GB video cards come out now. That'd be the only way to really get the absolute highest settings. You don't have to put the game at the highest settings to play it. It seems like a lot of people want to. When we were designing it it was with the intent of having future growth with the game. IGN: We've been receiving emails from players saying the game isn't running with minimum hardware configurations. You say you've future-proofed it to a degree, but what's your reaction to that?

 

Kevin Hoare: We've found that definitely with old drivers you'd have major performance problems. Throughout our development cycle we've seen variants in performance and we've had to work with mainly beta drivers mainly to this day with some of the hardware…There's power management issues where your CPU isn't running at the clock frequency that you purchased that can cause major slowdowns. We were able to reproduce that one. We've basically been trying to reproduce any kind of slowdown but when we were testing we were on fairly clean machines and we hadn't seen these kinds of problems…

 

IGN: When you say these kinds of problems what are you referring to?

 

Arthur Chiang: I've been reading about the texture drop out problem and I've been seeing what kind of hardware they have and it's usually the Nvidia 7900 series. We saw that problem two or three months ago and it was addressed by a beta driver that we received from them. Everybody was hoping that it would be out for our release but it seems we've just missed it. It has been released today so I think that's going to address a large proportion of those problems. Even right out of the box, as soon as you put that in, if you don't have this driver it's going to appear as there's no textures which is a pretty significant problem. IGN: Just scanning our boards at IGN some of the more hardcore people have found workarounds like a 'no restrictions' alteration that does away with the resource usage limitation and they're forcing AA and that sort of thing. What sort of message, though, is this sending to the more casual gamer who may have a PC that they want to run this game because it is a high profile title yet they don't have the know-how to go in and tweak all these settings?

 

Arthur Chiang: Well we've designed that auto-configure option for them…a lot of the testing we did with the auto-configure we didn't see issues on low-end machines. I think when you start tweaking and taking off the restrictions we have that protect you from yourself, you run into problems. It might load up initially, but 10 minutes later things are going to start corrupting, you're going to blow out your memory resources.

 

Kevin Hoare: Some of those command line options I put in were there with the intention that benchmarking sites could easily go through a large set of in-game settings quickly without having to constantly go into the game, change a setting, exit, and continually re-benchmark manually. So they could automate their benchmarking process.

 

It's kind of dangerous to use some of those command line options because they allow you to set settings higher than your machine can handle and you can basically crash the game, which can cause more problems. Which may be causing some of the problems people are getting.

 

Jeronimo Barrera: The other thing you were saying about the more casual player is, if you take a look at the number of times the game has been activated…it was very high. And if you take a look at Social Club TV where people are uploading what people have done with the editor, so it's not like no one's playing the game. There's definitely a lot of people on there. We do recognize that people are having problems with this but it's not the disaster that people have it hyped up to be. GN: I think the notion is that people want the game, they want to be able to play immediately with, as everyone does, as few frustrations as possible. We were fortunate enough to have that experience here, but amongst the public it basically doesn't seem to be going that way. What does that say about the nature of PC gaming? A lot of people are concerned about how PC gaming has become too complicated or convoluted. You see GTA on 360 and it doesn't look as nice, but it runs.

 

Jeronimo Barrera: Right but again it goes back to how many people are playing the game right now versus how many people are having the problems. We love the PC as a platform, we've done incredible things with it. GTA was already quite a powerhouse on the consoles and we were able to go in and do so much more on the PC so for us it's exciting to develop on it and we wouldn't want the PC market to go away. It is cutting edge if you want to make it cutting edge and that's what we're trying to do with this. There is a bit of growing pains but the end result is consumers are going to be very happy. The majority I think are happy with it.

 

IGN: It's difficult to tell, as we both say we're both browsing message boards.

 

Kevin Hoare: One thing I guess we should mention that we're including in the title updates. A lot of these startup errors are giving just error codes. What we're actually doing is putting in the text of what it actually means. So a lot of them are simple things like you need to have Service Pack 1 installed, Service Pack 3 for XP. Just little things, and right now the messages aren't there so it's more frustrating than it needs to be. We've addressed that in the title updates that we're working on.

 

IGN: In the meantime you've got these people online who are pretty angry at you, to say the least. Is there anything you'd like to say to them?

 

Jeronimo Barrera: We stand behind our product and we'll get you help and it's easy to reach us. We do find the forums to be a very useful resource for us to identify problems that everyone's having…The game has been out less than a week and we are trying to address everything. In the long run we're going to keep supporting the title. It's not a one-shot deal. As much as people don't like to hear the word future-proofed but it is future-proofed and there's a lot in store for gamers.

Edited January 15, 2009 by x8681150

[Hraptor]

Second patch is nothing only a rumor, so stop waiting and play the other games. DAMN!!! Saints Row 2 and Mirror's Edge take a month to arrived here!!!!!

Please, mentioning Saint's Row while talking about Grand Theft Auto is like throwing sh*t on my french fries. Please.

[noVa]

Second patch is nothing only a rumor, so stop waiting and play the other games. DAMN!!! Saints Row 2 and Mirror's Edge take a month to arrived here!!!!!

Please, mentioning Saint's Row while talking about Grand Theft Auto is like throwing sh*t on my french fries. Please.

it really is quite a terrible game lol.

[x8681150]

if you want real info on whats up with the 2nd patch go some where else ..in here they have somebody named charming charlie that when some one says something against rockstar ,he banns the thread with some excuses!!! ,so in other words there is no freedom of speech here !!!if you want real info go some where else!!!!! :devil:this its the only forum that's regulated by some one!!!!! :devil:just look at the comments and excuses he will put out in a minute(spam,topic repeated etc>),hes sold out with rockstar!!! :to him this game is perfect and if you say something different it bothers him!!!!tthis its what he toldme when i posted my ideas :::CharmingCharlie

Posted: Jan 14 2009, 22:52

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Tell me how did you actually miss the thread where people are ALREADY talking about whether there will be a patch or not. I am closing this because there is already a thread to discuss this and all you did was copy and paste the damn IGN interview. If you want to discuss the likelihood of another patch then use this :-

 

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=392213

 

:this its supposed to be a positive thread???? so lets all say how great this game is !!!!hurray!!!!!

Edited January 15, 2009 by x8681150

[noVa]

if you want real info on whats up with the 2nd patch go some where else ..in here they have somebody named charming charlie that when some one says something against rockstar ,he banns the thread with some excuses!!! ,so in other words there is no freedom of speech here !!!if you want real info go some where else!!!!! :devil:this its the only forum that's regulated by some one!!!!! :devil:just look at the comments he will put out in a minute,hes sold out with rockstar!!!

lol theres no info at all at the moment from rockstar...

 

so any threads posted about it are useless rumours or lies until one comes up with a source from rockstar itself with proof.

[mkey82]

so in other words there is no freedom of speech here !!!

In other words this is a forum led by some guys and, guess what, they lead it they way THEY want to. How outrageous is that!

 

Also, you can say/write what you wish, but in the end of the day you are responsible for it. And they will retain their right to ban you or lock/delete your threads/posts.

[Dcrysis02]

The locking of one topic is nothing.The locking of millions is a statistic.

 

Maybe they're the Stalins of this forum,but they do their job.In the end,all of the "Cock* Sucks","R* Gave up On us","Why,o why R* don't..." etc topics come down to one point.Nag,whining,and crying.There is really no need for several topics in that category.You're message does it's job in an old topic,if anyone want's to read it,they will,and if they want to answer,they will do that too.In the meantime have a

[babarian225]

NO NO NO NO PATCH!!

 

Stop Disturbing the Co*k

[How-To-Improve-GTA-IV]

WHERE THE HELL IS THE SECOND PATCH, ROCKSTAR!?

[Biohazard_X]

WHERE THE HELL IS THE SECOND PATCH, ROCKSTAR!?

On the moon.

[Dcrysis02]

WHERE THE HELL IS THE SECOND PATCH, ROCKSTAR!?

On the moon.

On vacation

[z3ro7]

Some people are so stupid... no second patch? ... are you crazy!?

 

The game needs a second patch... they cant even optimize the performance of the game.. but at least we need some new features in online game, like possibility to Kick some f*cking cheater, better ping optimization... and a better anti-cheat protection...

 

at least, for this.. they really need to fix.... now for the better performance.. i have my doubts...rockstar toronto dont have skills to givin us better a performance...

Edited January 15, 2009 by z3ro7

[turbo1508]

What second patch? They are in thailand down at patong beach getting served magaritas by 10yr old fanboys (naked). Charlie and the whole gang are down there 'partying'.

[FullMetal]

Yes, you got it right, tab out and Ctrl+Alt+Del, but when you do, right click the GTA IV.exe entry in the Processes tab and then choose the affinity option you see there (it could be a slide-out on the menu, and it could also be a pop-up with check boxes) and just give GTA 2 cores - if this helps, that would be awesome!

So 'just' give them 2 cores instead of the 4 that are already assigned to it? (because it says GTAIV.EXE has 4 cores assigned to it).

 

I'll try it, thanks for the information. I'll edit this post/post again to say if it helped or not .

[copperwire93]

Second patch is nothing only a rumor, so stop waiting and play the other games. DAMN!!! Saints Row 2 and Mirror's Edge take a month to arrived here!!!!!

Please, mentioning Saint's Row while talking about Grand Theft Auto is like throwing sh*t on my french fries. Please.

it really is quite a terrible game lol.

Is it really terrible? How about mirror edge?

[z3ro7]

Yes, you got it right, tab out and Ctrl+Alt+Del, but when you do, right click the GTA IV.exe entry in the Processes tab and then choose the affinity option you see there (it could be a slide-out on the menu, and it could also be a pop-up with check boxes) and just give GTA 2 cores - if this helps, that would be awesome!

So 'just' give them 2 cores instead of the 4 that are already assigned to it? (because it says GTAIV.EXE has 4 cores assigned to it).

 

I'll try it, thanks for the information. I'll edit this post/post again to say if it helped or not .

Just give 2 cores? are you crazy? do you really know what you are saying?

 

You need to set the priority to high... and dont mess the affinity...

If you "only" have 2 cores... the game only show two boxes selected.... and only people with 4 cores have 4 boxes checked..

 

CPU 1... 2...3...4... so if they have 4 cores... let them run....

for people with 2 cores the game dont show 4 cores on the affinity...

[fable2]

mirrors edge is the sh8t works flawless on my pc with phsyx on with an ATI card ((((((((HD4850))))