Here is my FAQ for the PS3 GTA Freeze. I've put both community information, and my own knowledge and experience into this. I'm also asking community members to fill out this form so that a data gathering/statistical analysis can be performed.
Community Affected:
PS3 and Xbox 360 owners are amongst those who are affected. Primarily "Launch 60 GB" PlayStation 3 are apparently the most common affected. Personally I have a "Launch 20GB" with a HDD upgrade to 120GB.
Take-Two has stated that only a small amount of people are affected.
Techinical Overview/Problem
Basically, during gameplay, or cut scenes, the game will freeze, or halt and become not playable. Residual affects from this include, not being able to bring up the PlayStation Menu and continuation of music tracks or dialogue. Grand Theft Auto IV is installed onto your Hard Drive and then all audio tracks are played off the disks. This method is often used with PC games to increase performance and decrease load times. From this we can derive that either a memory error is occuring, or bad file on the install is causing the game to halt. The disc or quality of the disc is not solely responsible.
Looking further into this, you can just address this to a memory issue, either in the VRAM or RAM. Coding for a game like this, more than likely involves the use of memory registration in your code. If there is a fault, which hardware related, this will cause the rendering or runtime to freeze. Different from a core dump, which simply means a crash of the system kernel and normally the console restarts, this simply means that the game has entered a lock state.
Of course, I did not write the code, so the above is merely a educated guess as to what is going on. But just from the symptoms of what is occuring to me and others, I feel this is the best guess.
- Game freezes randomly (cut scene or not).
- Audio continues to play after freeze.
- PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 affected (PlayStation more evident).
- Ejecting the disc restarts console.
- Soft-reset is needed.
- PlayStation Menu is unaccessible.
Troubleshooting
Simple troubleshooting methods were explored initially when this problem occurred. Simply deleting game data and game save data was the initial troubleshooting step. Of course, this seemed like a reasonable troubleshooting effort, and more then likely occurred because of a bad install. When that didn't work, I thought deeper about the issue. Some PC games have had the same issue in the past merely for the location they had on their Hard Drives. Well, some people have installed new HDD and also reformatted and that did not solve the issue.
If you take a different approach, you can try to "normalize" your console by editing display settings. One suggests setting console to 720p resolution, since PS3 upscales for those of use who support high resolutions. This of course would put less strain on the VRAM. Others suggested turning off the Vibration feature on your Dual Shock 3 controller, disabling network connectivity and also not using the auto-save feature in the game.
To me, all of these indicate a feature issue, possibly due to compatibility with newer features of the PlayStation. This would indicate older systems would have the issue. Unfortunately, you can't apply that because people with newer systems have said they have had the same issue.
Take-Two released a twelve-step setup that may resolve the issue. Users are still reporting issues.
- Disabling Internet [Failed]
- Disabling Vibration on DualShock 3 [Failed]
- "Twelve-Step" [Failed]
- Reinstalling game data [Failed]
Date of Purchase: Launch
Type: 20GB
FirmWare Version: 2.30
PSN Name: MooseQuest
HDD Size: 120GB
Free Space: ~20GB
Folding@Home?: Yes
Position: Horizontal
Audio: Digital Optical
Video: HDMI
Resolution: 1080p
Network: Ethernet
Speed: 1Gbps
I plan on updating this when I wrap more metrics around the data.
Form Submission
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