GTA4 for PC Buggy mess

[Rhomal]

I picked up GTA4 this weekend, figured been out long enought for at least 1 patch, should be atleast playable.

 

Oh contraire.. the rendering engine after 30-45 mins stops rendering about 1/2 the city. While 'physically' the objects are still there (you can drive into invisiable walls for example) you can't see them. And this is after the 38meg patch. This makes the game more or less unplayable until you restart the game. To say I am disappinted at rockstar would be a understatement.

 

Clearly this was a rushed hack job. From some searching I found out I am certainly not the only PC user having these issues. I will re-reconsider buying from them again.

[Llyranor]

PC games have bugs, news at 11.

[Rhomal]

PC games have bugs, news at 11.

 

What a simplistic view of the topic you have, your insight is amazing.

 

All games have bugs, platform is moot. However let me educate you and let you know there are varying degrees. I was able to play nwn2, fallout3 and gta vice city, san andreas out of the box without issues. Were there bug? yes, but at least the games were playable, this however the game isn't even that, and this my fustration with the issue.

[Killian Kalthorne]

Bugs is one of the reason why I am a console gamer now. Less bugs to contend with.

[Llyranor]

What do you even play on consoles aside from Mass Effect and Fallout in name only?

[wesley2]

This is really bad news, I remember heard about this recently. That really sucks because with a good machine this game should look and play amazing and be a heck of an immersive experience. I hope they can rush out a bug fix for this one because it's going to leave a lot of people disappointed if they can't fix this.

[Kaftan Barlast]

It also depends largely on the hardware, if you have reasonanly new stuff with new drivers then it shouldnt be a problem. If you're sitting on an old ATI and a windows that hasnt been reinstalled for years.. then you're in trouble.

 

 

 

And although GTA4 might be less buggy(consoles have bugs too, jerks) on the PS360... it looks like crap. The only way I could stand it was if I played it on my old 640x480 LCD tv so the ugliness got smeared out.

[Rhomal]

This is not a hardware issue. The textures not rendering is apparently a memory leak issue many other folks are reporting. While there are some work around to prevent the leak from crippling your game every 30 mins (some have reported these 'fixes' can get your game to run ~2 hrs strait before you need to restart) its not ideal to have to run a memcleaner or play with the FX settings to flush the texture cache every half hr.

 

 

For the record...

 

AMD X2 5200+

2gig dual channel RAM

8800GT 512meg video

XP 64bit

latest drivers

[mrmud]

Had you followed a bit of gaming news you would have known already that the PC port of GTA 4 is a disaster of almost unrivaled proportions.

This shouldnt come as news and it is not indicative of PC or even PC ports as a whole.

[Rhomal]

Should have, could have, would have... water under the bridge at this point.

 

Yes I SHOULD HAVE however with my previous success with rockstar ports I didn't really feel the need. Clearly that was an error on my part. None the less that does not excuse the poor condition of the port. Either way lesson learned.

[Maria Caliban]

If you'd bothered to read the very informative posts by mr. 'Swedish guy under moderation' then you'd have known how screwed you were days ago. Instead, you got to hold on to meager and fleeting hope until reality dropped on you like a pile of ****-bricks.

 

I have no idea how RockStar messed up like this, and I

[Bokishi]

I got some occasional minor slowdown issues, but it's very playable for me

[Rhomal]

If you'd bothered to read the very informative posts by mr. 'Swedish guy under moderation' then you'd have known how screwed you were days ago. Instead, you got to hold on to meager and fleeting hope until reality dropped on you like a pile of ****-bricks.

 

I have no idea how RockStar messed up like this, and I

[Tigranes]

It should indeed be the case where you can pick up a highly acclaimed game off the shelf and be able to play it without being tempted to slaughter the devs. Not much pleasure in telling people that is not the case, really.

 

We'll see how well they fix it up eventually, eh? Rhomal, you say a 38mb patch, but that's tiny by today's standards now (again, what the hell has happened here?). Blast those 500mb patches and all.

[Maria Caliban]

Yes I was in error not to do my homework, how many times do I need to say it? I assumed which was my bad.

 

And here I am going to sound old.. which I am getting.. but it must be nice to have the time to do nothing but surf the net and read gaming news sites all day to stay up to date on the latest news of every game. I was like that once... then I grew up. Just saying.

 

Once upon a time, I'd run out to buy the latest game/toy/comic book/anime DVD without reading reviews first. Back when my major source of income was named S-T-E-P-D-A-D. Then I grew up. (Meaning, I now read the reviews, decide reviewers are idiots, and buy what I want anyway. I still pick up crap titles, but I do my research first! )

 

That aside, I have no issue waiting for a patch however I shall not give RS the benefit of the doubt again. Which means I doubt I will buy their another product from them unless they do some serious arse kissing to us PC players. They go on 'the list' right below bioware (not for releasing buggy games but for releasing games with a unimaginative plot since bg2, at least to me.)

 

I enjoyed KotOR and JE. Mass Effect runs horribly on my PC, but so does everything but Fallout 3. I look forward to Dragon Age.

 

I

[Slowtrain]

I don't think people (here, gamers) should have to do homework to insure that the game for which they are about to lay out 50 US dollars (+/-) actually works.

 

It's totally outrageous what publishers and/or developers get away with when it comes to software "bugs".

[Purkake]

Ah yes, the good old days when PC games actually ran on PCs and you could reinstall them more than twice...

 

Rockstar was probably going to release it this fall in whatever state it was in and make a quick buck. They probably didn't care much for the PC money as it is much less than what they have already made on the consoles. Also, there are way better games to play at the moment anyway so save your money and time.

 

For some reason I am always more tempted to replay my old games rather than any of the new ones. I guess this is the future of the PC - crappy console ports and very few good games.

Edited December 23, 2008 by Purkake

[Hurlshort]

Maybe that was sarcasm, but PC games always were a huge hassle to get running. Heck, that's how I learned about computers, by spending hours in DOS trying to get the right combination of cryptic astrological signs so my games would actually run.

 

If anything, consoles have gotten worse. I used to be able to just blow into my games to get them to work on the NES. My 360 is a lot more complicated to trouble shoot.

[Hell Kitty]

I never understood the "but I can play games X, Y & Z, so A shouldn't have any problem" argument. I remember the Vampire forum with folks arguing that Bloodlines should run as well HL2 because they both use the same engine.

 

For years I haven't been able to play System Shock 2 without it crashing on my, on a variety of different systems. I'm amazed developers get games to run on as many combinations as they do.

 

Of course this doesn't excuse buggy games, but how well a game runs, or even if it runs at all isn't just down to how buggy the game is.

[Rhomal]

Well after reading much of the 'heated' debate on the steam and other gta forums I found a work around. Since its clearly a memory leak from the symptoms being detailed by myself and others I found and downloaded a little 60K app called cache cleaner. It displays the total system cache and the current amount being used with a button to clear said cache. After about 30-45 mins of playing when the textures stop rendering and the city becomes mostly invisable I alt-tab, hit the 'clear cache' button, then restore the game. After 6-8 secs of the rendering engine re-init all the textures and enviroment restores itself for another half hr or so. Rinse and repeat when the city starts to stop rendering. At least the game is playable without having to restart it every 30 mins.

 

On a side note, according to cache cleaner, seems everytime the cache used exceeds the system avail is when the rendering issue pops up. Again clearly a very bad memory leak.

Edited December 23, 2008 by Rhomal