Rockstar Games Warns Fans About Grand Theft Auto V Beta Scams

Back in April, Rockstar Games announced that Grand Theft Auto V would be coming to thePlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms. One thing many fans of highly anticipated games look forward to is the beta access. Getting the opportunity to play, test, and provide feedback on the game is one that many enjoy participating in. But, as usual, there are those that try to take advantage of a consumer’s enthusiasm and Rockstar Games is warning fans not to fall for any beta scams.

Considering the popularity of GTA V, which was able to generate $800 million in sales within the first 24 hours of release, it is no surprise that scammers would try to capitalize on that success and anticipation of the current-gen release. However, in warning gamers against these scams, Rockstar also revealed that there would be no beta test.

“Please note: There is no pre-release ‘beta’ test for Grand Theft Auto V,” reads the message posted on Rockstar's website. “If you see ads or solicitations to join a beta program, beware as this is likely some type of online phishing scam.”

Rockstar didn’t mention any specific scams in its message to GTA V fans. However, it should be said that consumers should make sure that such offers are issued through official channels.

Grand Theft Auto V will be available for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 18 while the PC version is slated for January 25, 2015. It is currently available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Ubisoft Claims CPU Specs, Not GPU Performance, A Limiting Factor in Assassin's Creed: Unity

A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. 

"Technically we're CPU-bound, he [Pontbriand] said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel.

"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second." 

This has been read by many as a rather damning referendum on the capabilities of AMD's APU. To some extent, that's justified -- the Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One is a modest chip with a relatively low clock speed. Both consoles may offer eight threads on paper, but games can't access all that headroom -- one thread is reserved for the OS and several more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations -- scarcely more than last gen, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements. 

What kind of AI is Ubisoft trying to build?

I think it's worth noting that the concept of good AI is entirely game-dependent. We can separate it into two approximate camps -- games that attempt to model near-lifelike behavior for a very small number of characters, and games that attempt to create a large number of characters that aren't blitheringly, humiliatingly, obviously artificial and stupid. 

What does this mean? It's genuinely not clear -- and sometimes, even small things can make an enormous difference to players. Take SimCity -- when Maxis launched the latest troubled incarnation of that franchise, it quickly became obvious that its Sims were terrifyingly moronic in ways that created problems for players. Instead of actually returning home, they simply walked into the first empty house they found. Rather than "owning" a car, they got in the first empty vehicle. This created massive traffic and housing snarls and caused job shortages -- the game treated characters as interchangeable parts that walked in and out of a machine every day, rather than as individuals with particular assignments and tasks. 

At the same time, however, trying to make NPCs smarter can run into its own challenges. Skyrim's NPC merchants, guards and bandits are often mocked for ludicrously stupid behavior -- but in many cases, these oddities -- such as being able to put buckets on shopkeeper heads and then steal at will -- are the result of sophisticated attempts to improve behavior by adding more flexibility. Shopkeepers aren't just invisibly aware of you if you steal something -- they can only know you stole it if they see you do it. 

Let's face it -- some of these AI decisions really were just terrible

Similarly, we laugh at bandits who return to normal status after a few seconds -- even walking around a dead ally while muttering "Must've been my imagination" -- yet few people want to play a version of the game where being detected always led to complete camp mobilization and being chased out of the area or killed. 

Somewhere in between the two lines, there's a balance -- but where that balance sits varies from game to game. 

What seems increasingly obvious is that this will not be the console generation of 1080p60 as a reliable feature. Unlike some, I don't blame AMD's Jaguar for that:  AMD has variants of the core clocked at 2GHz and above, albeit at higher power consumptions. Microsoft or Sony could've specced out a variant of the core clocked at 2-2.4GHz and boosted total CPU throughput by as much as 50%. They didn't. The programmable nature of the GCN architecture inside the Xbone and PS4 is meant to compensate for the relatively lightweight core, but AI calculations may simply be something it can't do much with -- GPU calculations tend to be high latency, and AI typically requires fast response times. 

So far, Sony and Microsoft's decision to minimize console costs and go with off-the-shelf designs that could reach profitability more quickly has paid off, big time -- but whether or not that continues to be the case long term is an open question.

Assassin's Creed 4 Bogs Down On The PC, Here's How To Fix It

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a gorgeous game, but if you've played it on the PC, chances are you've noticed the erratic frame rate. Whenever the action kicks up, the frame rate drops, often precipitously. This is caused by V-Sync -- if V-Sync is active, the game will only run at either 60 or 30 FPS, and if it can't maintain 60, it'll drop to 30. Unfortunately, turning V-Sync off isn't really an option -- tearing is awful, on both AMD and Nvidia solutions.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to mitigate the problem, regardless of whether you're an AMD orNvidia user.

Vexatious V-Sync

Assassin's Creed IV's V-Sync support is oddly implemented. First, the game's engine is capped at 63 FPS, period, no matter what. Turning V-Sync off has absolutely no impact on the maximum frame rate, provided your GPU can reach 63 FPS. Turning V-Sync off will cause tearing and allow the frame rate to move dynamically between 63 and 30 FPS, but it won't allow for anything higher than that.

  
See the jump between 60 FPS and 30 FPS at erratic intervals? That's the behavior we want to eliminate. 

Since the game engine can't exceed 63 FPS, you might think that there's no benefit to a higher refresh rate. This is untrue. The way V-Sync is designed to work is this. The game will try to run at the refresh rate of the monitor (usually 60Hz). If it can't, it'll fall back to half speed, or 30 FPS. If it can't maintain 30 FPS, it will fall to 20 FPS.

Unlike most games, which allow the end-user to set the refresh rate directly from an in-game menu,Assassin's Creed IV uses the desktop's refresh rate. If you own a high-end monitor that's capable of a 100Hz refresh rate or more, setting that rate on the desktop will ensure a much better experience. If your monitor can handle a 120Hz refresh rate, for example, that means V-Sync will attempt to hold to 60 FPS. If it can't maintain 60FPS, it will fall back to 40 frames per second. Not only is the gap between 60 and 40 FPS less jarring to the eye, Sustained 40 FPS is far smoother than sustained 30 FPS.

Solution #1 is to increase your monitor's V-Sync setting. If you do, you get a pattern like the above, where you can see performance is split between 44 and 60 FPS, with a few isolated drops below that. But the truth is, there are only a handful of 1080p displays that push above 60Hz. If you own one, great. If you don't, we need a better solution.

Enable Adaptive V-Sync (Nvidia)

Nvidia's Adaptive V-Sync is one way to solve this problem. Adaptive V-Sync works by disabling V-Sync on the fly when the frame rate falls below 60 FPS, and re-enabling it when the frame rate is back at that point. The advantage to Adaptive V-Sync in Assassin's Creed IV over just running with V-Sync off is that Adaptive V-Sync helps reduce the screen tearing that otherwise plagues the game.

To enable Adaptive V-Sync: Right-click on your desktop, choose "Nvidia Control Panel," click on "Manage 3D Settings," and then select "Adaptive" from the Vertical sync options, as shown below.

The impact on the game's frame rate and overall smoothness is significant. The image below shows Assassin Creed IV's performance in 192x1080 with maximum details and FXAA enabled running on a GTX 770. V-Sync is enabled on the left and Adaptive V-Sync is enabled on the right.

The difference between using Adaptive V-Sync and turning V-Sync off is the tearing. Performance-wise, the two modes are identical, but Adaptive V-Sync produces much less tearing then the alternative.

Download Radeon Pro (AMD)

AMD doesn't have an equivalent to Adaptive V-sync supported in its drivers, but there's a third-party utility that can provide the function: Radeon Pro. The latest beta version can be downloaded from the website (this last version adds support for the R9 family of cards). The first thing you have to do to use Radeon Pro is create a profile for the game you want to use. Left click on the green plus, navigate to the Assassin's Creed IV directory (typically C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\games\Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag\ and choose the "AC4BFSP.exe" file as a target.

Then, click on the "Tweaks" tab, find the V-sync setting at the top, and choose "Dynamic" as shown below.

Click to enlarge

With Radeon Pro set for Dynamic quality, the R9 290X's performance profile changes dramatically.

Note that in this case, the reason the R9 290X is pushing a nearly perfect line while the GTX 770 shows variation is due to relative performance -- the R9 290X is the much better card and I don't have a GTX 780 to put up an apples-to-apples comparison. The bigger point is that the problem is solved, for both cards.

Smoother frame rates lead to better experiences

This solution won't magically make the game run faster for everyone -- you still may need to turn detail levels down to hit your preferred frame rate  -- but if the jerky behavior has been annoying you, it should improve the game.

Special thanks to both Nvidia and AMD, where teams on both sides helped me track down this issue