Even though PC users still have yet to have their first taste of GTA V, Rockstar recently released a patch of the new-gen console version of the game which hasn't pleased many players. According to some commenters, it made the game look strikingly worse in some situations, with a seeming disappearance of parallax occlusion mapping, a reduction in anisotropic filtering and a simplification of collision physics.
There was some initial debate as to whether this was actually true, but after some research and analysing of the new and unpatched versions of the game, Digital Foundry has concluded that it is indeed true, Rockstar downgraded the visuals of GTA V with its latest patch.
However, there was a reason for this. Not all of it was intended and Rockstar has now fixed up the physics problem, and pop-in distance has been sorted too, some of it however seems to have been, as the reduction in visual clarity has helped performance.
As can be seen in the above video, going through busy junctions no longer causes a frame rate dip and other areas in the game have also seen improvement.
The question is, is the downgrade in visual clarity worth increase the smoothness of the gameplay?
What do you think?
