Codemasters has GRID patch on way Comments by Robert Purchese

I've been playing the 360 game since Friday and now have the Global License so I've easily amassed in excess of 20 hours game time on it. The only freezing I've encountered is a slight hiccup when the car crosses the finish line at the end of a race and sometimes a minor hitch during the Sponsorship earnings screen, otherwise the game has been virtually flawless for me even when listening to custom soundtracks from the HDD. I do have the 120 GB HDD though.

Consoles = bringing PC gaming to the masses

It freezes in every race for me and normally not just once.

No problems here. Great game by the way.

Edit: I have the 20gb 360 (manufactured Nov 2007 - replaced my 1st RROD one).

@Darren - The 120 GB machines do seem to be immune.

@spooky - There's a youtube video showing 6 freezes in a race. I was getting about the same, but it's only about 1 or 2 now.

Ah, I have an Elite, and Grid is the last game I played on it. I guess the scratch space for it is unfragged which will help.

Weird, but typical MS, that they would let the 360 HDD fragment with no user way of fixing it. (If I remember, Oblivion even put a small fix into there game for it's scratch area).

They do realize that not every 360 is internet connected, right?

I wish Microsoft would add a defragment option to the Xbox 360 so you could run it every so often, say, overnight. Every time a game uses the HDD or you download/delete DLC or demos, the HDD becomes more defragmented as files are scattered all over it so some sort of housekeeping tool is really a must and would surely minimise the number of issues that 360 games are seemingly prone to. Remember Oblivion and BioShock? I always despair when the usual solution for these problems is to copy your profile to a menory unit, remove the HDD and play the game that way until it's patched... I mean what is the point in having an HDD in the first place if you cannot use it properly for games?

Have anybody compared the PS3 vs 360 retail versions?

Has the PS3 retail version been improved compared to the demo which had framerate issues?

If the PS3 is on par with the 360 reg. framerate, I will get that version instead due to the stuttering/freeze issue.

360LOL

Well at least I'm not the only one having issues! Froze up on me several times during the race and in the replays...not happy, but at least they're working on it.

Sounds like it must be attempting to do syncronous writes to the HD for replay data. That seems like it's asking for trouble.

@Beano

I played both the 360 and PS3 demos and decided on buying the PS3 version of the game (if I didn't have a Dualshock 3 I imagine I might have gone for the 360 version just for the rumble effects though, I really have a hard time living without that in racing games).
I've seen a few complaints about screen tearing and framerate drops on the official forums, but in the eight hours or so I've clocked in so far (playing on almost every track and in most cars) it's been completely smooth 99% of the time (and probably dropping a couple of frames per second at the most outside of that, barring the occasional replay where it might drop down to the mid 20s when a lot is going on in a zoomed out view).
And I think the times I've noticed screen tearing can be counted on one hand - and never during actual races, the few times it has happened has been when the camera quickly zooms in on the cars on the starting grid and I think I might have noticed a torn frame in one or two replays as well.

I do seem to recall other cases where screen tearing for some reason seems to have varied from TV to TV. I'm playing on a 40" Samsung M87.

Ok thanks... but did you notice if the retail version was better than the demo?

EDIT: I played both the 360 and PS3 demos thru HDMI so I doubt it's my TV which is the issue ;)

Got it on PS3 and PC and really impressed with the PS3 version. Plays brilliantly and a really good atmospheric racing game. PC has had no problems incidentally and running everything maxed out.

Frankly I didn't really think the demo was particularly bad. Slightly blurrier than the 360 demo perhaps and minor framerate drops, but nothing catastrophic.
As I said though, the full version certainly seems entirely smooth to my eyes pretty much constantly, so either I'm not particularly sensitive to minor drops (but that goes a bit against my experience with other games, sometimes I can be very sensitive to mid 20s framerates) or they have made some performance optimizations since the demo. And they did say that was the case.

Miths: "And they did say that was the case."

Where have you heard/read that?

In a thread somewhere on the Codemasters forums a week or two ago. There was actually a fair number of developer posts leading up to release.

Ive only seen 1 tear on the PS3 version and that was on replay... Ive clocked up probably about 10+ hours so far, and other than that no problems to report...

On the Xbox issue, you would think there should be some defrag tool on both the Xbox and PS3, seems a bit of a mistake not to, considering all the downloading of demos, deletingetc that we all do. I am considering upgrading my disk at some point, but it makes me wonder, that the larger the disk the worse the problem will get with regards to files all over the place.

Had the freezing on my hd so took the plunge and upgraded to a 120gb (was coming anyway)

Brillent game though. Reminds me of the smile I got when playing GT3 for the first time.

@makeamazing

I don't know about the 360 harddrive, but according to what I've read about the PS3, the internal disk uses a proprietary encrypted filesystem that is based on or fairly similar to the Linux ext2 filesystem (FAT32 is just for any external disks), which means it probably doesn't get fragmented to even remotely the same degree as FAT32 or NTFS Windows filesystems.
Harddisk fragmentation is generally a Windows issue - I believe defrag tools do exist for Linux and Mac, but they aren't really needed.

@ Miths

Ah ok thanks, good to know.