Grand Theft Auto IIIII - HDD City Stories

Playing on PS3 I get pop-in like a motherfucker. Sometimes when I'm shooting across town at 100 mph the textures will take so long to load that it literally looks like my car is floating across the ground for a few seconds.

I haven't had any issues like that. 360, install disc installed on the hard drive. Play disc in the disc player. I do get times when other cars won't show up until they're kind of close if I'm flooring it down the highway, but it's pretty rare.

Lenas_sl said:

Playing on PS3 I get pop-in like a motherfucker. Sometimes when I'm shooting across town at 100 mph the textures will take so long to load that it literally looks like my car is floating across the ground for a few seconds.

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Not seeing anything like that on my PS3 (I have the disk version of GTA). Every once in a while I notice a fence or something minor pop in.

Lenas_sl said:

Playing on PS3 I get pop-in like a motherfucker. Sometimes when I'm shooting across town at 100 mph the textures will take so long to load that it literally looks like my car is floating across the ground for a few seconds.

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Are you using a disc? Or did you buy it off PSN? Supposedly the PSN version has texture streaming problems.

PSN version :/

No issues for me (PS3, disc).
Anyone who has installed from PSN and changed their HD to a SSD having these issues?

Lenas_sl said:

Playing on PS3 I get pop-in like a motherfucker. Sometimes when I'm shooting across town at 100 mph the textures will take so long to load that it literally looks like my car is floating across the ground for a few seconds.

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I get this on Xbox. My pirated copy on PS3 is 2x worse though so I live with it. With how terrible the textures are you would think it shouldn't be so bad. I sometimes get bad frame rate slow down on both consoles when a lot is going on. Pretty sad they just didn't wait to release on next gen but I can understand how much larger the current gen market is.

Lenas_sl said:

PSN version :/

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I'm guessing you're using a slow 5,400 rpm hard drive in your PS3? A 7,200 rpm hard drive or an ssd should clear up the streaming issues.

Whatever came in my PS Slim, man. I dunno. Shouldn't have to upgrade your hardware for a game to perform properly.

Lenas_sl said:

Whatever came in my PS Slim, man. I dunno. Shouldn't have to upgrade your hardware for a game to perform properly.

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Well, the game was built for simultaneous streaming from the disc drive + hdd to make it look as good as it does in such a massive environment. The game does perform properly on what it's meant to run on and it's not meant to run on just the HDD.

Lenas_sl said:

Whatever came in my PS Slim, man. I dunno. Shouldn't have to upgrade your hardware for a game to perform properly.

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Better than the alternative to lower the ability of the game I guess. That's what they did with GTA 4. I remember the developers saying in an interview that they would be able to add more NPCs and cars if they could design with a mandatory install in mind, however, they couldn't do that because there were 360 consoles sold without a hard drive. This change was done in the engine, so it also applied to the PS3 even though they all contained hard drives.

Sadly I do notice popins in this game. I have an original fat 60gig console, with the same hard drive, and downloaded it off PSN. One place where you can spot it easily is when you drive a boat towards the wheel on the pier. The pier has a house at the end where it will load a good 4-5 seconds before the actual pier pops in with the deck first then the fences.

I need to buy a new hard drive for it though. Some data has been corrupted that can not be restored, even tried formatting it today. Only 47 gigs available even after a full format. Considering that the PSN requires you to have the space to download the install file for the game, and then have equal amount of size left to actually install it, I can't even have two large games installed at once I had hope for the PSN store when the Last of Us had a installer patch file similar to a PC, it only required the exact amount of space, not twice. Haven't seen that feature in any other game yet.

Oh lord, listen to the Sony apologist hard at work.

The Ancient_sl said:

Oh lord, listen to the Sony apologist hard at work.

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More like Rockstar apologist? It works exactly the same on both systems with the HDD+Disc stuff. If you go pure digital on it it's basically your own fault regardless of the system, they even released a notice about it before the game released. Either upgrade your HDDs so it isn't an issue or get the disc version since it was built with the disc in mind.

I bought it on PSN and haven't noticed any issues, but then again, I'm a lot less sensitive to things like that than most people are. I just play the damn game.

Sean_sl said:

Well, the game was built for simultaneous streaming from the disc drive + hdd to make it look as good as it does in such a massive environment. The game does perform properly on what it's meant to run on and it's not meant to run on just the HDD.

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That's a fucking retarded statement, since they're selling it through the PSN store. If it isn't "meant" to run solely from the HD, they shouldn't be selling it online.

Tuco_sl said:

That's pretty closed minded.

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At the very least they should put a big huge disclaimer on it saying "hey, just so you know, if you don't take the time to put an expensive SSD or new HD in your 5 year old PS3, the digitally downloaded game will run like absolute dog shit. But we're going to charge you the same or more for it."

Mostly I take issue with Sean being an apologist for Rockstar, excusing the issues because it wasn't "meant" to run solely from the HD of an old PS3. That's just plain garbage. The only "notice" I saw was Rockstar's advice to Xbox360 users. If I didn't follow this thread, I'd probably have just bought the digital version, and I'd have been hosed with an inferior version of the game.

Yeah it's pretty fucking lame to say, "Oh well the game wasn't meant to be played that way." Don't fucking offer the download then.

I'm not mad about it and I'm not complaining about it. I'm just saying that it happens to me occasionally, and it sucks when it does. I'm driving along chaotically and all of the sudden I gotta slam on the brakes because I don't know where the fuck I'm going. That's a bad gameplay experience and Rockstar should have the world loading more prioritized so I see roads and buildings before I see people.