The Grand Theft Auto franchise is certainly one of the most popular sandbox series of games out there, having won over fans with its amusing story and innovative gameplay. It brought a lot of new elements to the sandbox genre, taking it to a whole new level in terms of realism, and, with the latest Grand Theft Auto IV version, gained unparalleled critical acclaim.

It has even won the Game of the Year distinction at the recent Video Game Awards show, surpassing other high quality titles like Metal Gear Solid 4 or LittleBigPlanet. But even though the console versions of this game, which were launched in April, registered huge sales, the PC edition, released a few weeks ago, failed to measure up.

This is largely due to the fact that this version was plagued by many bugs and problems, which rendered the game unplayable, much to the disappointment of most of the customers who had spent their hard earned money on it. The fact that this title was poorly optimized, meaning that a PC with higher than average configuration could hardly run it, made a lot of users angry, and some of them even shared with us all of their complaints. 

But now, it seems that Rockstar, the company behind this game, is finally going to set things straight with the gamers, and so it has delivered the patch that they have been eagerly anticipating. This new fix, which can be downloaded here, promises to repair quite a lot of issues that players have been reporting, providing a better memory management, improved graphics options, and a better mouse input. Here is the complete list of changes, as found on Kotaku:

“-Better memory management to improve stability, especially for players with lower-end machines
-Added a fix for the ATI 1900 series video cards to improve stability and the visual quality of shadows
-Custom graphic settings and multiplayer characters will now save
-Several improvements to the Video Editor, including higher rendering quality, smarter naming of videos and better effects during replays
-Mouse-based movements with sensitive mice or gaming mice will properly detect
-CPU speeds will now query periodically rather than just at startup, resulting in smoother framerates
-Fixed a crash after legal screen German customers were reporting”

Although this patch won't resolve all the problems users have been encountering, it is a start, and let's just hope that Rockstar will continue to offer a quality support program for all the customers who bought the PC version of GTA IV.