PS3 Grand Theft Auto IV is 640p, nobody cares

by Justin McElroy on Apr 30th 2008 9:30AM

As a news blog it's kind of our job to bring you tidbits like this, but it doesn't make it any more tantalizing, especially when we know the maelstrom of dumb things like this can cause. But here it goes: Thanks to the denizens of this forum thread, we now know that the PS3 version of Grand Theft Auto IV runs at 640p, as compared to the Xbox 360's 720p *ducks*.

Before you start hunting for your fancy pitchfork, let us remind you that until 17 seconds ago this problem didn't bother you at all. And because of some of the processing effects, some people even insist that the PS3 version looks better to them! But hey, if you need something to get angry about, far be it from us to take that from you.

[Via PS3F]

Source

Tags: grand-theft-auto-iv, gtaiv, hd, ps3, resolution, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (184)

You're right.. it doesnt matter. It's friggin' Grand Theft Auto. That's all that matters.

This is kind of like being told, "Hey, I know you were coming here to have sex with Scarlett Johansson, but it turns out you have to have sex with Adriana Lima instead."

ENOUGH JOYSTICK.

i would still be slightly dissapointed kayel, cause scarlett is teh sexy

But see that's exactly the problem, Joystiq. EVERYBODY CARES. This is exactly what makes up a 360/PS3 owner. Who has the higher resolution? This is all they bicker about back and forth. Look at the comments, they're up to 130!!

Sony owners boasted 1080p when PS3 was announced. 360 owners scoffed at them when the Elite was announced with HDMI.

Meanwhile us Wii owners are over here with the best input device (again) of any console this generation.

@Co
to be honest.. i personally think that the Wii is an incomplete system without GTA IV!! i mean its just too awesome..

its awesome enough that i couldn't care less which version is better.. as long as i play it!!

btw, i was at a friends house who owns an xbox 360 and he had GTA IV as well, and i brought my ps3 with GTA IV.. we went on rampage on both the consoles.. and to be honest they are identical.. i couldn't even see any color differences!! but owell that might just be my GTA IV Fanboy side..

Greeetzz

forgot to mention, it was a 50" 1080p tv

*puts ear to ground and hears a rumbling sound*

Here come 360 fanboys ready to take their revenge for the "Halo 3 640p" fiasco...

Let the 360 boys have their fun. It sorta pisses me off sometimes that i see all the PS3 fanboys treat the 360 in such a condescending manner. Even if it is 640p the ps3 fanboys will still argue that it looks better on their system regardless if they make any sense or not. Personally i dont even own GTA, not my sorta game.

Anyways i love watching these guys argue.

All around me are familiar faces, worn out faces, worn out places

"Even if it is 640p the ps3 fanboys will still argue that it looks better on their system regardless if they make any sense or not."

----

And it does look better. The PS3 has slightly better anti-aliasing and doesn't seem to suffer from dithering as bad as the 360 version does, based on what I've seen. It also has less texture pop thanks to that annoying hard drive install.

Resolution isn't exactly an end-all if you have other things to make up for it, i.e. anti-aliasing, depth of field processing, advanced lighting, motion blur, etc. Look at Call of Duty 4 - that game looks fantastic and better than a lot of 720p games and it's running at something like 600p on both systems. They've got some really good anti-aliasing going for them in that game, as well as some nice DoF effects. Then look at Halo 3 at 640p - unfortunately the game has little to no anti-aliasing, so the lower resolution really haps bring out the jaggies.

Oh, and for the record, I own and play the 360 version of GTA4.

Hook line and sinker

DWells, it wouldn't need that extra bit of anti-aliasing had the game run at 720p like the 360 version... Then again, it is harder to run higher resolutions than just anti-aliasing so it figures something like this would happen.

Epic fail!

ORLY?

I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?

All your base belong to us!

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

You just mixed YTMND,4chan,something awful and Lolcatz in the same post

Oh shi-

And Star Trek you mean... damn kids...

Then I'm more surprised at seeing 640p/1080i/1080p printed on the back of the box; if this article is true.

Hey fox hound, I made screen printed shirts with the fox hound logo on it. full color Let me know if you want to buy one.

The game is rendered at 640p. The numbers on the back of the box refer to the video output so you know it'll be compatible with your TV.

Jagzi11a ---
I'll have to get back to you on that; I'm actually in the middle of a lease exit/move to another place. So funds are tied up supporting that craziness. @_@ Much thanks though, I'll have to ask you about it later on.

voodoo_craig ---
Thanks for the heads up. I always saw it on the back of boxes, but was unsure. :]

So the version with the lower resolution looks and runs better than the version with the higher resolution. Well this definitely makes the performance issue on the 360 make sense. Not sure how people could tell the ps3 version looks better though....

THE SYSTEM I PURCHASED IS BETTER THAN THE OTHER SYSTEM YOU PURCHASED!!!!

Not to brag, but if the ps3 version runs better than the 360 version then color me confused cause my 360 GTA runs impeccable.

No framerate dips no matter how crazy it got, no pop up, no glitching. I even took about 30 minutes out to look for pop up only and I couldn't find anything, not even a single tree popping up. It literally runs flawless on my 360.

i agree with jordan...except ive seen somepop in on multiplayer

Since I don't have the 360 version myself (and if I did have both systems, I sure as hell wouldn't be buying a game twice) I'm left with the observation by websites reviewing them both. Don't kill the messenger.

I hear ya though. Half Life 2 is far from "unplayable", and I only noticed some framerate drops in episode 2.

Hop in a heli... you'll see some pop up then

Another reason I picked it up for 360 last night, achievements, 720p, online that works, doesn't freeze and no lame install.

OH! forgot to mention that exclusive DLC also :P

Doesn't freeze for you, plenty of 360 owners having the freezing issue chief.

80 extra P's ftw? lol

The PS3 version has richer lighting and better filters--if you look at comparison videos that show cutscene footage, it's quite easy to see that the 360 version looks more "fake" and artificial, a similar scenario to playing an old PC game that you force to run at super-high resolutions.

I don't care about Achievements, my TV upscales the game to 1080p (with HDMI, no less), I haven't had any trouble playing multiplayer (Free Mode FTW!), it hasn't frozen on me once, and the install only took like 7 minutes.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that my 360 is a piece of shit that shuts off randomly and only displays in HD sometimes. By sometimes I mean you have to wiggle the component cable (no HDMI, thanks MS) in the port until it sits just right, and even then the slightest wind will readjust it just so much that it reverts back to SD (which is what causes the 360 to shut off).

My XBL subscription just ran out a few weeks ago too, so to play multiplayer on the 360 version (at least, one month from now) I'd have to throw down another $50. I can't even connect to XBL because to do so I'd have to turn my account into a Silver account, which is a hassle I just don't feel like dealing with. So not only can I not access the DLC, I don't care about it enough to go through the motions to be able to.

So you see, it's all situational. Don't act like your situation is the situation everybody is in, making the 360 version of GTA IV the grand master of all. Fucking fanboy.

my 360 version froze on my 6 times in 3 hours last night.

Online that works? well, that is a rockstar issue for the ps3, but I froze while loading rooms too. go xbl

achievements? how bout this achievmenement...you fail at life. I play games to play games, to feel special about doing something stupid in a video game.

by the friggin game for whatever system you want..it doesn't matter.

Glen

Sit tight, the waaaaaambulance is on its way buddy. Everything is going to be A OK!

joeyg

calm...the fuck...down

seriously

Sorry SDF, defend all you want. The 360 version is the one to get. Nothing will change that.

"Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that my 360 is a piece of shit that shuts off randomly and only displays in HD sometimes. By sometimes I mean you have to wiggle the component cable (no HDMI, thanks MS) in the port until it sits just right, and even then the slightest wind will readjust it just so much that it reverts back to SD (which is what causes the 360 to shut off)."

???

xFenixKnightx, haha, very funny. Actually, not really. Thinking that legitimate beefs with a system is "whining" is really, really, ignorant. I guess all the people sending their RRoD 360's back to Microsoft need to shut up and wait for Bungie's waaaaaambulance to show up too?

rv, what's the "??" for? I mean exactly what I say. That's what my 360 does. The AV input is sketchy.

Glen, sell your 360 and use the money to buy one of those helmets, since you're obviously a retard.

I'm not the retard that sells sketchy products.

I'm also not the retard to trolls the internet calling people retards.

But I am the retard who doesn't sell his 360 because he really wants to play Gears 2...

Thats just very strange. If its still under warranty you should send it in, although I guess its not because you put up with that problem.

It might be under warranty. This is my 3rd 360, so I don't think I bought it more than a year ago.

"My XBL subscription just ran out a few weeks ago too, so to play multiplayer on the 360 version (at least, one month from now) I'd have to throw down another $50. I can't even connect to XBL because to do so I'd have to turn my account into a Silver account, which is a hassle I just don't feel like dealing with. So not only can I not access the DLC, I don't care about it enough to go through the motions to be able to."

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. When your gold subscription runs out it AUTOMATICALLY switches to a silver account, it must be really hard to go through the motions to do that.

Really? Then why can't I access XBL Marketplace? I know for a fact that it's not my internet. Maybe it's because I had my Gold account switched to "auto-renew," but when the time came I didn't have $50 in my account. I got an e-mail about it and everything.

Glen, it automatically goes to silver account if you don’t have the money to pay for a gold auto subscription. I don’t know what your net problem is, but that’s the way it has worked for the rest of the world – so the issue is on your end.

Example: If you use a 30 day gold pass, at the end it goes into a silver account by itself. I have done it on my other accounts before - and never had to tell it to do anything for that reversion to take place.

As far as your AV issue - you have a bad connector, so send it in for warranty repair. I have not heard that issue as being a common one.

The game is fantastic and I am loving it, but it is disturbing that they are allowed to claim that it run in 1080p on the box when it runs BELOW 720p. That is just false advertising. I mean, can game makers now lie about the number of players in multiplayer or the existence of online options?

I'll say the same thing to this that I did the Halo 3 fiasco. 98% of consumers couldn't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42" screen from ten feet away. Nobody noticed this until the pixel counters went to work (although I'm curious if the 640p issue is responsible for the "ants crwaling" artifacts or if those are on 360 as well).

And at the end of the day, the signal is being uprezed to 720p regardless, same with 1080i and 1080p. Frankly, it's a non issue no matter how you look at it. If the game looked like shit, yeah, we could argue it. But ti doesn't so we can't.

By "ants crawling" do you mean the little shimmers on the road while you're driving?

If so then yes, that is in the 360 version as well.

Sorry, "ants crawling" is a term we use here at work since we see it most often in airport markings in the runway.

Basically it's when a high contrast change in color is pasically less than one pixel tall. And so it appears to have a stepladdering effect but as the camera rotates, these isolated vertical lines appear to move along the surface. It was rare that I saw it in the PS3 version and more often than not shows up during cutscenes. But it was there.

The shimmers on the road have more to do with the lighting reacting to the specular map in all the wrong ways (as it appears only during certain times of day). Shadows could use some smoothing as well but the larger an object is, the more that doesn't work well without hitting the performance something fierce.

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PS3 Grand Theft Auto IV is 640p, nobody cares

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