GTA IV patch released - but is half-baked

Rockstar fixed the mouse bug for the bowling game. However, they seem to have forgotten to apply it to the other sub games - such as playing pool.

I guess we wait for another patch for that?

Of course, the official word from Rockstar is it is due to over-sensitive mice.

Yeah, I have that problem at work... so I keep a box of kleenex handy when it starts to get sniffly.

What, are they getting mouse input at the hardware level instead of the nicely processed, smoothed pointer in the Windows API?!
That just confirms my suspicion that they have been taken over by brainless lunatics.

I was kind of wondering this, as mouse-look and general mouse controls work as expected. It is almost like they tried to be clever and have now fixed one thing (bowling) but forgot to fix the others.

The official word from Rockstar is the game was written for "Future PCs". In the future of course, PC's won't have SLi or Crossfire, which is why performance is so poor, even on powerful current generation PC's.

The real deal is this: GTA: IV is unfinished. It was rushed for Christmas. Even the Installer boot-menu thing doesn't work properly, it just prints gibberish (presumably due to me having a non-English version of Windows).

My brother bought it and can't even play it now, as it's dog-slow even on high-end PCs (at low-to-medium graphics settings), randomly crashes to desktop every 5-10 minutes, leaks memory like a sieve and the new update actually broke the mouse controls for him (the character always pulls to the left). He only got it "working" at all because someone posted a DLL in the GTA forums. I saw him installing and running it before that -- it just kept silently exiting after the unskippable logos and legal drivel.

The PC versions used to be the best, but how times have changed. It's unbelievable how much they've screwed GTA IV up on the PC, even ignoring the crappy DRM, and I was really looking forward to it.

No sale.

Won't buy this game then. Blaming oversensitive mouses is bullshit, just make something to configure mouse sensitivity ingame.

I hate DRM anyway and didn't buy a lot of games for only that reason, but looking @BlitzSupport message, I'm gonna buy something else for myself this xmass.

One of the other brands I refuse to buy most games from is EA for example, many games are buggy from them and now they added DRM to most new games.

I bought this game (finally) and have to say it doesn't run too bad on my below-minimum-spec PC (1.6 Core2Duo and RadeonX1950pro) - I'm getting around 20 to 30fps on the lowest settings, which is just about enough to be playable, although it is one of the visually most untidy and ugliest games I've ever seen with holes in the ground, terrible texture filtering and the most god-awful postFX (which I've hacked to turn off).

The gameplay itself however is quite good so far, the city feels nicely alive and the pedestrians go about their business, and the slo-mo action-cam thing you can trigger by holding down a button is brilliant (although I think Driver3 had this ages ago) - I've been playing it for about 2 hours just spinning and crashing the cars in slo-mo.

Looking forward to a new CPU and graphics card so I can at least push some of the sliders up from 0, although it shouldn't be necessary given that my PC can run Crysis etc.. just fine - it's a very sloppy port this one, and I can see why so many people a annoyed with it.

Really? That's interesting because on my Q9650 / Radeon HD4870x2 it runs on average at 15 FPS on the lowest settings, according to the benchmark. This is on what is practically the most powerful PC you can buy at this time (and ironically bought specifically because I thought my old PC wouldn't be powerful enough to run GTA IV), and well above both minimum and recommend requirements for the game. The graphics look only marginally better than San Andreas at settings I'm running it on, and the new PC is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the PC I used to play that on, never mind the PS2!

And yeah. The new update broke the sound here. Every other time I start the game, there are no engine (or ambient) sounds, or speech apart from in cutscenes.

This is the final nail in the coffin on the PC vs. Consoles debate. For the same price of my new computer, I could have bought a 50" HDTV, an XBox 360, and pretty much every game released on the XBox 360 (certainly both interesting games), and still have enough money left to buy a second hand car. I'm sure they're going to blame it all on piracy tho'.

GTA IV has some weird coding. It's coded to resolution - so if you lower the resolution, it cripples aspects of the engine. The engine assumes that you want to downgrade features based on the resolution. This seems to be having major, major consequences.

Most people find this somewhat bizarre and I think it is clearly leading to the problems that the game is having.

I can report success in dropping the resolution down to 1024 x 768 and then faffing about with it on 1680 x 1050 to shunt the graphics engine up into gear.

I can now play it very well on my PC, but I had to do a lot of faffing about to trick the engine.

I think the engine needs coaxing into shaking off the built-in throttling that Rockstar put in (for some strange, strange, retarded reason).

Faff about enough and you should get it running okay - then you can start pushing the settings up.

I now play it fine on:

Medium texture quality
High render quality

50 view distance
50 detail disance
25 vehicle density
16 shadow density

I can nudge these suckers up - but I am frightned the engine may collapse on me and leave me at square one.

Just ordered a 4850 and 2.6ghz Core2 so hopefully I can at least get a few more FPS out of it and perhaps move the draw distance sliders up a bit too, although judging by Flameduck's PC it seems to a complete lottery as to whether your PC spec makes any difference to the way it runs.

I assume that HD4870x2 means you have them in whatever the ATI-equivalent to SLI is? Does GTA support that? because it doesn't support SLI.

I know none of you are listening, but why use a PC? You could have been playing a bug free version of this game a long time ago on a proper computer system, a game console.

I can understand playing this on a pc, if the pc was far far far more powerful and you could make the draw distance further and generally increase the graphics option. But sadly, the port is extremely bad, and makes it a completely pointless exercise.