Digital Foundry on patches for GTA: The Trilogy - lots of improvements, but the compilation is still bad

Six months after the terrible release of GTA: The Trilogy, Rockstar Games has managed to release several major patches.
Has the game been brought back to life? To find out went Oliver Mackenzie from the Digital Foundry.The main comparisons were conducted on two builds for the Xbox One X: 1.02 - patch, released simultaneously with the release of disk versions.1.04 - the latest, March patch.What was improved (somehow).In the original release of rain for some reason is not superimposed on the water surface and was very strong and bright - looking at the picture through it was unpleasant.
By version 1.04 the rain has changed: the density of droplets remained the same (or close to it), but now the rain is much more transparent and pleasing to the eye, as well as superimposed on the water, does not penetrate under hard surfaces like roofs and is not so strongly tied to the player's position.
However, the rain still moves horizontally with the player - it is noticeable, for example, if you quickly drive a car.Initially, the re-release of San Andreas lacked effects for height: if you climb a skyscraper or fly a plane, the whole map is visible as if in the palm of your hand.
Because of this the world looked very small, and in the distance was clearly visible border of the water surface.
In the patches added a setting \"Haze on the ground\" - it turns on the fog, hides distant objects and, in Mackenzie's opinion, looks good.
However, there is still a problem: when the player gains altitude, the haze occurs too noticeably.The original version had a large number of errors on signs and signs.
In the patches many typos were corrected, in some places the resolution was improved, but on some surfaces you can still see reflective inscriptions.
The patches corrected collisions and bugs in the missions.
But even with 1.04 one of the cutscenes in San Andreas got hung up, and in GTAIII you will find invisible geometry on the road.Performance mode on consoles keeps the bar better at 60 fps, although at some points there are still falls to 50.New haze, hiding from you what San Andreas is really small.
What's left as beforeThe grass covers the ground incorrectly in some places, and vegetation breaks through the road.The ambient occlusion effect is still too greasy - if a character stands against a wall, it seems to glow black.The beach in Vice City reflects light too much.Animations do not fit models with such high and smooth geometry, which often causes cutscenes take on an unintentional comic effect.
The author of Digital Foundry admits that this is unlikely to be corrected in patches - too much work.
In quality mode on next-gen consoles, there are still moments when the frames are rendered unevenly - because of this there is a feeling of \"braking\".One of the corrected typos.
Separately, the video scolded work with textures: Some of the new surfaces are drawn too simply, as if it's a plug, and \"upscale\" through the neural networks in some places too noticeable - the algorithm obviously lacked information due to low initial resolution.Mackenzie believes that the developers should have gutted the ports for the first Xbox, which are already using textures of higher resolution - sometimes four times larger than on PS2.
With them, scaling through neural networks would have been much more decent.The number of typos in signs and signs is still high.New textures (even if they're good) don't look good on older models - they often lack geometry.
For example, there are walls where normal maps were applied and therefore bricks look convex, and there are walls without normals - they look unnaturally flat and/or monotonous.According to an employee of Digital Foundry, many texture problems can still be fixed in patches.One of the textures in Definitive Edition on PS2 and the first Xbox, as well as an example of scaling based on the Xbox version.
Compared to the Definitive Edition version, the result is much cleaner and higher quality.The conclusion of the video is disappointing:Old GTAs are hard to find in decent form on modern devices.
There's the mobile version, which has plenty of bugs and controls are based on touching the screen; there are the PS2 Classics releases with horribly uneven frame rendering; there are the original PC releases, which can have trouble launching on modern computers; and there's the Xbox 360 and PS3 port of San Andreas, which inherits all the problems of the mobile version.
With that context, Definitive Edition is not a bad way to enjoy these games.
\u003C...> For most people, Definitive Edition might be a better option.
And that's sad on a fundamental level.
Some of the most respected, most popular games in history deserve something better than problematic remakes.Oliver McKenzie