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[Shallow012]

This poster can confirm jack shit. I backed up GTA4 and the backup has popup issues and the original (which Ive played for about 30 hours) has none (well no more then could be expected). This is with a VAD6038 and occurs with only the backup like I said on the first page.

EDIT: quoted wrong poster

[Shallow012]

-and-
anyone who pirates this game is a dickcheese. This game is extraordinary and if your to cheap to shell out 60 bucks to support one of the greatest games to come out in the last 2 generations then maybe you should find a new hobby and I hope you get caught and you get sued. I could give a fuck  about who steals what but this one is so good IMO that Rockstar deserves to get paid because they really delivered for us this time.

[SonyPete]

Woooahh Shallow012, can we say negative energy. Shall I grab some    for your show. Not sure who your directing this towards but its not needed, since two of us have confirmed original copy issues. Maybe the issue is with the ixtreme fw which we have on our drives. Just because you have a benq and not the issue does not mean its not out there, especially since you don't seem to have an modified fw on your drive in the first place. Your comparing apples to oranges which does nothing to figure out the issue.

Lets keep this thread decent shall we, Shallow012.

[jimbobjim]

As promised in post #33 I have done some comparison tests on a customers Falcon/Benq vs my Xenon/Samsung. I must say I was sceptical about there being any real issues with the game on a Benq machine... how wrong I was. For the record both machines were flashed with the latest Ixtreme firmware and running at 12x speed. Both consoles had my hard drive attached and were using the same profile.

Both the original and verb backup work flawlessly on my machine, with very minimal popup/texture issues. Load times are swift and never seem to drag.

First I tried the backup in the customers machine, the first thing I noticed is that the game took twice as long to load up. When loading, GTA artwork is shown, my console rarely goes past the third picture before loading my mission, however, the Benq got about seven or eight pics in before starting to load the mission. It was nice to see these new pics but not so good on a technical stand point. The next thing I noticed was the popup... when driving at normal speed I found myself hitting invisible objects that would appear two seconds later (very annoying) Also, buildings would appear as grey blocks and seem to take a long time before the detail was drawn in. Basically it was a popup fest and not a good experience.

Next I tried the original, to be honest I was expecting it to be the same as the backup... wrong again. The original behaved much better and loaded nearly as quickly as in my console. There were still more popup issues than with my machine but they were much less noticable.

All in all I only played about 5 mins on each disc but it was long enough to see a difference.

Basically, if you have a Benq drive, run your original disc or buy another drive.

Never thought I'd be so happy to have a crappy old xenon with a sammy drive

EDIT... Took some load times if anyone's interested. I timed from the first screen with white writing on a black background to seeing Niko in his apartment.

Benq orig - 1:09
Benq backup - 2:04

Sammy orig - 1:12
Sammy backup - 1:11

[mattzane227]

Dude I'm telling ya not all benq's have trouble with GTA4.  I made my backup and it runs fine.  No invisible walls.  No texture problems even when flying down the road top speed.  If everybody's benq was doing that I bet there would be alot more than 3 pages about it.  I do have a newer 360 though, it's a Feb 08 so I don't know if maybe when your laser is getting older it has more trouble with the game.  I don't know.

[herd]

I heard that plugging in a HDD might solve the problem on arcade systems. Can anyone test out and confirm?

[mattzane227]

I have a Benq and a hard drive and mine runs fine, but I think somebody else said they have a hard drive and it still messes up.

[the soul poet]

Sorry to hijack the thread, well it is similar issue.  Question for people here is how much of the game have you unlocked? When I had 1 Island unlocked there was barely any pop up at all except online.  Now with the original and a backup I am just getting things like bushes, objects at the side of the road and grass being drawn as I drive along.

This didn't happen till I unlocked all Islands, does anyone face this issue?

By way it happens on an original non modded Samsung MS28 machine too but I used my HDD.

Issue with HDD or normal?

[Spidey29]

Here's what I've found:

- Original: Minor texture loading (as expected), hardly noticable.
- Backup: Some texture loading (I have the default speed for the drive) in certain areas. Not enough to take away from gameplay or cause issues (inivisible walls/etc).

However, I do have one major issue with my backup ... I'm missing half of the second Island (with the strip club). It makes certain missions impossible with the backup (have to load the original). Although, does provide for some fun times when the AI drives into the "black hole" and falls to eternity (you can get under the map, since the model is missing).

Bad burn? Bad image? I pulled from the original using a KreonFW drive inside my PC.