That Spore kerfuffle earlier in the year sure seems like spilt milk compared to Rockstar’s GTA IV balls-up. The multiple DRM systems have proven to be the least of the troubled port’s problems – seems Kieron was lucky to even get into the thing, never mind that half his graphics were AWOL.
Everyone’s having their own miseries with it, it seems. So, below the cut: a quickie poll to see how many of you lot are having problems with the game. That’s along with more ranting from me, and a list of the many fun Fatal Errors players are running into. I’m a victim of RMN40, which apparently means I need to install XP SP3. Problem is I’m running Vista. Nice!
Eventually I established via forum-trawling that manually installing a .NET update might fix it. Why .NET is vital to the game running I don’t know. Another 20 minutes of downloading, installing and screaming later, I was past the mysterious fatal error, and amazingly this managed to be the first ever Games For Windows Live game that accepted the Live login I have for my Xbox. Hooray! Achievements, or something. Then it started repeatedly telling me that it needed to restart due to some account change, but would just just carry on regardless when I pressed enter. Huh.
Finally, after a tortously long loading wait, I get to watch the intro. It looks great and runs smoothly. Then, at last, I’m in car, ready to drive. Except it’s now only running at 1fps. As a final indignity, it crashes to desktop 10 seconds later. And there I rest. I suspect I’m now beyond caring.
It’s interesting that none of us who reviewed it (my write-up’s in the latest PC Format, where I’m significantly less forgiving of the multiple login doormen than others were) didn’t hit these tech problems in the code we were sent just a couple of a weeks back. The performance was unacceptably sluggish unless I dropped everything way-low, but there was none of these bewildering impasses. We were on a different clutch of activation etc servers and, I think, had a different version of Securom, but the Fatal Errors seem unrelated to that. So did bugfixing after the review code introduce new problems?
What an ‘orrible turn of events, at any rate. So much so that Valve are reportedly offering refunds for folk who bought the thing off Steam and can’t get it to run. Rockstar themselves say they’re working on a fix, but are reliably distant about it:
“We are aware that a small number of fans are having problems running GTA IV on their PC’s (sic) and we would like to assure them we are working to help solve these as quickly as possible.
We would ask anyone that is encountering difficulties to contact their local technical support helpline for advice and recommendations. These telephone numbers can be found in the game’s manual.
There is also a regularly updated technical support page available on the Rockstar Games website http://www.rockstargames.com/support/ where there are many useful faqs and information on how to resolve some common problems being encountered.”
“A small number of fans” and “half the internet, apparently” are, of course, one and the same. Let’s see, shall we? Please check one of the below options and we’ll see what the RPS average is. Please note we’re talking only about what you genuinely experienced first-hand when installing and running the game, not that you consider anything with DRM in or GFWL nag screens unplayable on principle or anything like that. (Oh, and apologies for the errant ‘n’ – it’s a bug in the voting plugin. And, observes Kieron, if bugs are ok for Rockstar, they’re ok for us).
My GTA 4 experience was...
Hopefully we can expect a patch sharpish, anyway. For some extra light reading, here’s Bit-tech painstakingly comparing the PC and console versions. The PC version, suffice to say, doesn’t come off well. Of course, anyone thinking of blaming this mess on the platform itself deserves a thump in the eyelids – the problems with GTA PC are almost unprecedented.
Oh, those fatal errors. Gotta catch ‘em all!
RMN20 – Windows Vista: Need to have Service Pack 1 or higher to proceed.
RMN30 – Windows XP 64 / Server 2003: Need to have Service Pack 2 or higher to proceed.
RMN40 – Windows XP: Need to have Service Pack 3 or higher to proceed.
DD3D50 – D3D Error – DirectX 9 video card required
TEXP110 – D3D Error – Failed to create texture – Please restart the game
DWIN20 – D3D Error – Failed to query memory. Please re-start the game.
DD3D10 – D3D Error – Please re-boot your system
DD3D10 – D3D Error – Please re-boot your system
DD3D30 – D3D Error – Please re-boot your system
DWIN30 – D3D Error – Please re-boot your system
DD3D20 – D3D Error – Please re-install the game and/or re-install DirectX
DWIN10 – D3D Error – Please restart the game
DD3D60 – D3D Error – Shader Model 3.0 or higher is required
DD3D70 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve D3D Device. Please re-boot your system
GPUP10 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve D3D Device. Please re-boot your system
TEXP20 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve D3D Device. Please re-boot your system
TEXP30 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve D3D Device. Please re-boot your system
TEXP80 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve D3D Device. Please re-boot your system
DD3D40 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve device capabilities. Please install latest video card driver and/or re-install DirectX
TEXP10 – D3D Error – Unable to retrieve device capabilities. Please install latest video card driver and/or re-install DirectX
DD3D80 – D3D reset failed – Please restart the game.
STRB10 – Failed to delete file – Please re-boot your system
RMN10 – Failed to read file – Please re-boot your system
STRM10 – Failed to read file – Please re-boot your system
STRM20 – Failed to read file – Please re-boot your system
BNDL10 – Failed to write file – Please re-boot your system
STBF10 – Failed to write file – Please re-boot your system
VOIC10 – Fatal voice chat error – Please restart the game
RESC10 – Out of video memory – Please re-boot your system
BA10 – Out of virtual memory – Please re-boot your system
EA10 – Out of virtual memory – Please re-boot your system
TEXP60 – Unable to create color render target – Please re-install DirectX and/or install the latest video card driver.
TEXP70 – Unable to create depth render target – Please re-install DirectX and/or install the latest video card driver.
AE10 – Insufficient Memory to Start Game – Please close some applications and restart the game
PC10 – Unable to retrieve D3D Device – Please reboot your machine or reinstall your display driver
TF10 – Unable to write to disk – Please restart the game
WS20 – InitWinSock failed – Please re-boot your system and/or re-install the game
WS30 – InitWinSock failed – Please re-boot your system and/or re-install the game
Related Stories:
@well : It’s not just the installs, painful though they were. I’m finding it barely playable at settings equivalent to San Andreas. Simply put, the game chugs at any speed for me, and I well exceed system requirements. I keep trying – it’s clearly a first-class, must-play game. I just wish I could, y’know, play it. There’s no excuse for it – it’s a terrible product, made all the worse for it’s obvious, unattainable excellence. It’s got to be reiterated: GTA IV is not worth buying. No developer, or publisher, should put out a product this damaged. If it were a horse, it would be crapping chromosomes with every step.
Games for Windows is a system to advertise XBox Live, and make so people buy more XBox 360.
Microsoft use a monopoly to gain more power on a different market.
The poor users of GTAIV and other games have to suffer it, just because of that. Is software installed against your will, with the sole purpose to advertise one product (XBox Live).
GTAIV is troyanized with a rootkit, install two adware programs (Social Club, GFW). Is actually worse software than Real Player.
didnt work for me… untill i used a crack
“Considering the poor performance on so many systems, you must be joking.”
20 hours on the game and not a single crash or bug, not even any slowdown on the highest rendering setting on my now pretty average system. Yeah what a “joke”, obviously unlike the perfect seriousness and by no means rabid hysteria of the anti-drm crowd.
The really funny thing about all this is that once you’re over the slight wow effect the game is pretty dry.
1 quick question, are the shadows supposed to be seriously pixelated at the edges? It looks pretty horrible in heavily shaded areas, like under the train tracks near the first safe house.
The irony is that the last two GTAs were actually really good ports. It was a happy story – after the utter mess that was GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas were both ported with care, love and attention. Whoops.
where the option in the poll for
I bought it on my playstation and am now very glad that i didnt decide to wait.
This is one of those occasions where I’m deeply ashamed to be as smug as I am about not touching this release with a 10-ft pole: much as I love the PC, I’ve learned some hard lessons in recent years about buying into anything jizzed-over with raw hype. Publishers have used gamer anticipation time and time again to push out shoddy, beta product, hoping to make their fortune before people cotton on, and I’m SICK to DEATH of it. I simply won’t buy new releases anymore, not until I’ve judged the response from the wider gaming community. I have better things to do with my life than spend days/weeks consulting forums, adjusting config files, downloading patches etc….just to get a game to run acceptably.
Sadly, for many gamers GTA IV seems to have taken this horror to new extremes, various parties bundling invasive software with it hoping that the wow factor will overcome the added inconvenience. It seems with every major release now, some fresh hell gets added to the mix by someone hoping to push their agenda onto the PC platform. Once it’s been out there a while…we get used to it, then another piece gets added….remember when Steam was voted the worst ever innovation for PC consumer gaming? Now, to read the comments on here and other places, it’s the saving grace of the platform. How low we’ve sunk.
Half the time it’s the evil money men ruining gaming, the other half – it’s the schmucks in gaming land who keep letting things like this slide. When is it enough, people? Where are we drawing the line?
The poll is lacking a ‘Laughs mockingly having played the game six months ago without any trouble whatsoever’ option.
I’m sorry, but this is a rather stupid point to make. The reason why Steam was much disliked was because…it sucked horribly when it was first released. It doesn’t nowadays, in fact it has evolved into the single best PC game distribution service which is why people, myself included, love it today?
I can’t help wondering how the pirated version works…
Wouldn’t surprise me if it removes at least half the bugs along with Securom and all the online logins :)
(not curious enough to download and try for myself, i’m a bit of a coward that way)
“….remember when Steam was voted the worst ever innovation for PC consumer gaming? Now, to read the comments on here and other places, it’s the saving grace of the platform. How low we’ve sunk.”
Er, no. I don’t remember that, actually. I do remember though that, a few technical hiccups some people experienced aside, most people except the usual doom and gloom paranoia crowd which now for the most part is a little ashamed welcomed it with open arms. :p
I bought the R* Collection on Steam last week and have been playing though the GTAs. Guess I’ll stick with that until the GTA4 issues are resolved (if ever).
Whats wrong with gfwl it stays hidden unless you press a button and you can stop it notifying you of achievements and messages.
Well, after messing around with Windows Live stuff i finally got in the game (with savegame option)… put everything to low and game runs about 20fps.
AMD X2 3Ghz (@ 3.2 overclock)
4Gb RAM
9800 GTX 512mb
Vista 64
So yeah, kind of crappy framerate but not as bad as some i’m hearing, considering my rig is fairly average/ok and not a quad core with a better graphics card.
Apart from the Windows Live messing around stuff, i’ve not much problem with the game, other than there being no stickcam for mouse/keyboard controls while you’re driving. And the framerate.
i’d rather suffer the pain of getting this game to run, than sell out and buy a console.
I must say that I’m quite happy to have it work without much trouble on my PC (C2D E6850 3GHz, 3Gb ram, 8800 GTS (640Mb) XP Home SP3, GTA IV bought on Steam), the only problem I’m having is the fact that the (game) sound gets really distorted any time someone speaks to me on Ventrilo.
The funny thing is that I’m a pirate (no righteous tirades, please, I have bought over 100 games on Steam, I do support the industry when it doesn’t force me to either spend a lot on shipping or travel by bus 40 minutes to get a game) trying to stop pirating games and everything actually works for me.
Had to skip logging in to Rockstar Social Club for the first day, but it has worked since then.
Framerate is terrible, even running at the lowest settings, but it is playable. As comparison, I play FarCry 2 at full stuff which is lovely and smooth.
From reading vast threads, it seems like certain graphics cards are particularly well suited; 8800GTX has been brought up a few times. Also that it relies a lot more than most recent games on the CPU. I wonder how much of that is due to the nature of the game (with all those little people needing their AI) and how much is due to poor design. For instance I hear that shadows are being handled on the CPU rather than graphics card, which seems a little odd.
When I play, I have THREE social networking services running. None of which I have any interest in. Hurray!
Wait, shadows on the CPU?
Thats damn strange, because lately I’ve heard talk from the intelligent programmer types about how its beneficial to send some processes to the GPU instead of the CPU. I seriously doubt you could reverse this, except maybe on the consoles… Sounds as though the development time for the PC Port was spent on the wrong things.
Oh, secret top tip!
Press P during the game, and you can toggle post-processing effects. This gives a depth of field effect and motion blur.
Personally I hate the effect, finding it far too blurry. But it might be nice for some.
Does anyone else find it ironic that one of the ads on this page is sometimes for GTA4, proudly proclaiming, “NOW ON THE PC”?
Actually, it worked pretty well for me.
Sure, load times are a bit long and performance a bit low, but apart from that the only problem I had was with the user-supplied music (”Independence FM” radio station), which seems to make the game unstable. (But that might be a problem with my MP3s)
Apart from that I had a single crash after playing 12 hours since it came out, so that’s not too bad.
Oh, and two times textures wouldn’t load at all after starting the game, however that could be fixed with simply restarting the game. This only happened directly after starting & loading a save, not while you’re playing.
So all in all it’s far from perfect, but certainly playable for me (I’ve finished about half the main missions so far)
Apart from the lack of anti aliasing, which makes the game look like a PS1 game, and the really fugly shadows, I haven’t experienced any problems with GTA IV.
Something that I hate from console are retarded messages like “don’t shutdown the machine while is saving”. And is another thing that I love from the PC. On a PC game you just press F5 and a message say “Game saved” (or even not message at all). The game don’t need to stop, you can save anywhere, and it just work.
For some reasons console games have a problem with “just work” and need to add extra stuff, that is totally lame, or look like something forced by lawyers.
Tip i found while browsing forums.
Put -norestrictions at the end of the shortcut command line. Lets you crank up to the highest settings, which (unbelievably) only affected my FPS by 5 on the ingame benchmark when going from almost lowest settings.
Can also be done on steam (which i am using). More info here – http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=379662 .
Runs fine on my system. Hated the epic install with two online accounts to set up but once I was past that I avoided the issues others were having.
Make us a video of you sitting in their car park in an ‘invisible/wireframe’ car with a sign saying ‘can i haz a patch plz’. ;)
Hoop-jumping circus aside, I think the game’s biggest flaw is that it’s simply not all that.
Unless you’re following the main story/missions (which just feel like GTA: The Greatest Hits), there’s not really much to see and do. Even the cops seem a bit half-hearted in their attempt to chase me around after I’ve shot up an entire city block.
I’ve gone back to play through GTA III again and I’m having a lot more fun.
I pre-ordered on steam but got a refund the day before it came out on foot of all the DRM stuff I’d read. I did it on principle, only half expecting this kind of torrent of problems. I’m so glad I did now.
Rockstar are a bunch of bastards anyway:
point 1:
Fans? These people are CUSTOMERS, not fans. if you bought a new Sony LCD TV and it didn’t work would you appreciate being called a Sony ‘fan’?
point 2:
they make games like Manhunter, which makes the whole industry look bad.
point 3:
They never release mod tools for any of their games, even though the community creating mods out there is huge.
point 4:
When hot coffee came out, Rockstar immediately blamed the mod community, and said some very inflammatory things, calling the people responsible ‘Malicious Hackers’ who had ‘backwardly engineered’ their game. Later it turned out they wrote the mini game themselves, and LEAKED the mod to the community, then pissed all over them.
God the install took forever and a day and a few crashes later I finally managed to get the game running. Even in enormo-pixel, lousy shading, jaggy vision I have to say it’s a lovely looking thing though.
I wonder what kind of chatter is going on at Rockstar HQ over this stuff. I wonder if they’re crapping themselves?
@MetalCircus: HA! I imagine the conversation’s going something like this:
“So how much did we sell?”
“Shitloads”
“Awesome”
“A bunch of people have been complaining about… everything though”
“Sorry what did you say, I was counting this big pile of money.”
I picked it up in Best Buy… Here’s how that turned out.
After what must have been a full hour just installing, I’m on the phone with Take2 because there’s no product key printed on the back of the manual. I have to send photographs of my manual and receipt. I’ve had to create not only Social Club and MGFW accounts, but also a 2k support account. I’ve mailed all the requested items, and still I wait. I bought the game yesterday. Apparently my ticket has been escalated into a hole. I should have just used Steam. At least then I’d be on to dealing with the bugs and crashes by now.
I suppose I can understand having to maintain a R* account for certain features, but being forced to join the Microsoft-in-your-business-for-no-good-reason club is most unwelcome. This goes to show that a rock-solid franchise hopping in bed with Microsoft is something of a kiss of death. Even if I ever get the game working, I will have to play it Microsoft’s way, or not at all.
All hail DRM. Fail. (epic)
in the gta 4 is say:fatal error:rmn40
what i shoud be do?
I’ve just installed the game and the only issue I’ve had was that the login to Rockstar Social Club failed for the first, ehm, 8 attempts or so – not a pain, just minorly uncomfortable for 20 minutes.
Not checked the game much so far – just the intro and some driving around running people over at the dock *cough*, but all seems ok so far.
Perhaps I’ve been lucky, or is it the case that the most vocal people are those for whom it’s not working? Why pipe up if all is going well?
I was sort of dreading installing this after hearing several-hour-long ordeals but it was pretty quick and painless and the game performs more or less exactly as I was expecting. The only thing I see wrong is the distant scenery dithering being wonkified (technical term) in the same way that distant textures were in Oblivion. Even with my ageing x2 2.01ghz it is more than playable. Mystifying.
If you get the “no texture” bug thing, just change resolution and change back and everything should be working.
Haha, bang on cue I got the aforementioned invisible textures – installing the NVidia Beta drivers sorted that out, at least. The bummer now is that Roman keeps phoning and Nico refuses to answer the phone or put it away again. That patch might be welcome after all :P
I’m not buying this until I get a “demo”.
I’m still waiting for Rockstar to explain to me why I get a better framerate in Crysis than in GTA 4.
Im a big GTA fan, i went out my way to get this game and after all the frustration installing the damn thing, it cant even play smoothly on low graphics! And my machine is a top end machine. They rushed to Release this game, DRM sucks. Kthnxbye
Actually, I’d call GTA IV a rather good port. Here’s why – to me the quality of the port is not related to the quality of the technical coding (which seems to be quite low in this case). It’s a measure of how well they adapted the game to the new platform in terms of things like controls, settings, new content, usability, etc. And GTA IV looks better on PC – I can make out all kinds of details I never could on my SDTV beforehand. Watching fake ingame TV is hilarious and can zoom right to fullscreen. The cops no longer seem to glom onto me the moment I steal any car anywhere. Shooting people is of course easy with mouse aim, and even the notoriously finicky driving seems a bit more user-friendly with PC controls. All in all, I’m liking it a lot better on PC than I ever did on 360. That, and it easily and seamlessly transitions between mouse and keyboard and the 360 controller without even going into a menu. Just use one set or the other as you please. Even the tooltips will immediately shift to the appropriate controls.
Unfortunately, my framerate was slowly dying as I played on and was unacceptably low in particular during high speed driving chases. And the shadows as previously mentioned look awful. The P key produces post-processing that helps mitigate that, but that has its own visual drawbacks. And the game won’t remember that you’ve activated it.
So if they can fix the technical problems, particularly the framerate issues (I’ve had no trouble with crashes, possibly because I don’t log into the Social Club and use a crack to disable the copy protection.), I think they have a winner on their hands.
I’m quite despondent about GTAIV. I was so looking forward to it and I only buy a handful of games each year, but I can’t play it due to fatal errors. I spent four hours yesterday evening jumping through all sorts of hoops installing this and that, fiddling this patch or tweaking those settings, and still it’s unplayable. It’s really not a very good show, is it?
Works perfectly fine on my quite-capable-yet-not-hi-end-PC, never crashed, not a single problem with Social Club. Running Vista SP1. And that’s it.
My pc is ‘modest’ in terms of its spec, but according to R* it should play…Skt 939 X2 4800+, 2Gb, XP sp3, BFG 8800GT OC2….from what i’ve read so far, i can forget it and so can R*!
Why would i open my self up to so much frustration?
Another customer lost for the idiots at R*