The graphics (based on Criterion Games's RenderWare engine) and visual look were a bit simplistic and even a little cartoony in style but it also gave the designers a way to create a vast game world without having to worry about doing highly detailed visuals. Grand Theft Auto III and its two follow ups, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) improved the graphical looks slightly but all three games were built with the PS2 in mind which has relatively low hardware specs. Thus it wasn't hard to port all three games to the PC platform where one can expect users to have rigs that are much higher than the PS2's specs (all three games were released for the PC around six months or so after their debut on the PS2).
For the next full blown title in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar North knew it would be made with the PS3 and Xbox 360 in mind. Both consoles have multiple processor cores (three for the Xbox 360 and eight for the PS3) so Rockstar definitely wanted to use the each console's hardware power to the max. The result was a game, using Rockstar's own in-house RAGE game engine, that had a lot more art, modeling detail and game physics than any previous GTA title, adding more to the game's immersion.
And that may be part of the problem with the recently released PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. The port was primarily handled by a team at Rockstar's Toronto studio and it's clear while playing the game itself they had to deal with the fact that GTA IV was developed for a hardware set up that used higher hardware specs than perhaps some of the PCs that might be running the game. In a recent Valve hardware survey of its customers, just over 40 percent of their users still only have one CPU core while another 40 percent or so have just two cores.
The end result is a PC port of a console game that, unlike most other console titles, really took advantage of their console's hardware power but then was unable to fit neatly into the PC's rather unique hardware requirements. Even if you can get the game to actually run (we will get back to that point later) our experience with playing GTA IV was sometimes stymied because of performance issues. Frame rates would drop dramatically in action sequences and even under "normal" playing conditions frame rates would barely get above 30 frames a minute We played the game on a PC with an Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6800 CPU with 4 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card. All of those specs are above the so-called recommended hardware needed for the game.
Of course, we couldn't get the game to run at all at first due to all sorts of issues we and many others experienced while playing GTA IV for the PC. Textures disappeared almost entirely in places. We had issues with the game crashing to the desktop. We couldn't sign onto the game's Rockstar Social Club for multiplayer matches. It took a patch for the game itself, updates for both the Rockstar Social Club and Games For Windows Live and an Nvidia graphics driver update to even get the game to run properly.
And that may be part of the problem with the recently released PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. The port was primarily handled by a team at Rockstar's Toronto studio and it's clear while playing the game itself they had to deal with the fact that GTA IV was developed for a hardware set up that used higher hardware specs than perhaps some of the PCs that might be running the game. In a recent Valve hardware survey of its customers, just over 40 percent of their users still only have one CPU core while another 40 percent or so have just two cores.
Of course, we couldn't get the game to run at all at first due to all sorts of issues we and many others experienced while playing GTA IV for the PC. Textures disappeared almost entirely in places. We had issues with the game crashing to the desktop. We couldn't sign onto the game's Rockstar Social Club for multiplayer matches. It took a patch for the game itself, updates for both the Rockstar Social Club and Games For Windows Live and an Nvidia graphics driver update to even get the game to run properly.
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Looks to be a sloppy, disappointing, and rushed port job through and through. Between this and the atrocity that is Bully for the PC, I've lost much of the respect I had Rockstar. Luckily I played most of GTA4 on the 360 so I don't feel too cheated here but I would have bought the PC version day 1 had it been a proper port and no SecuROM. As it stands, maybe I'll pick it up once it is down to $20 or so and will keep fighting to get my money back for Bully which still doesn't work on my computer.
...bysmittyPosted at 2:25PM on Dec 22nd 2008 by bysmitty