Has Rockstar really downgraded GTA 5?

Last week, YouTube footage emerged showing that Grand Theft Auto 5's 1.08 patch for PS4 and Xbox One had seemingly downgraded elements of the visual presentation. Parallax occlusion mapping was gone, anisotropic texture filtering had apparently been made even worse than it was already, while collision physics

had been simplified. On top of that, long distance pop-in also seemed to take a turn for the worst. Had Rockstar really released an update for the game that made GTA 5 significantly worse, not better?

Our schedule was too packed to take a look at it at the time, but the video clearly had an effect on the developer, who posted this message: "We are aware of some graphical issues on the Xbox One and PS4 versions of GTA 5 after the most recent Title Update, and we are investigating a fix now."

That fix appeared to arrive shortly thereafter in the form of patch 1.09, and according to the "ElAnalistaDeBits"- creator of the original YouTube vid - collision physics and deformation, along with the distance pop-in had been resolved, but parallax occlusion mapping and texture filtering were still borked. And that's where we come in. It's been a while since we looked at GTA 5, but we archive as much of our work as we can, and we still retain our launch day assets based on version 1.02 - the day one patch. You never know when they'll come in handy.

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