GTA IV patch is coming

As is, oddly enough, Christmas.

The masses have spoken, and Rockstar Toronto has answered - with a the announcement that a patch is coming, and the re-iteration of their stance that less than one per cent of GTA IV owners are experiencing difficulties. In fact, in the words of Rockstar Games Technical Support: "We've been reading the forums and understand that several of you are experiencing difficulties with Grand Theft Auto IV PC..."

Several... Yeah. Right.

Anyway, here's the important details, straight from the buggy horse's mouth:

We are working on making a patch available in the next few days. Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a Games For Windows – Live game the patch must be certified by Microsoft before release. The patch is already at Microsoft and we expect a speedy approval.

The patch contains a variety of fixes including:

-A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
-Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
-Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
-Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
-Overall savings to memory
-Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
-Multiplayer character settings are preserved
-Support for DirectInput controllers. Note: The current hack way of supporting these controllers may not work with the improved functionality. So we recommend you remove the hack before upgrading to the patch.

Issues with power management software have also been fixed (slow speed, double speed issues). Even after the patch comes out setting power management software to maximum performance is recommended. We’ve seen cases where power management software does not detect the game is running and puts the CPU in green mode.

That last bit is the most interesting, and there's many more 'we're fixing X, but we still think you should do Y' comments in the original post.

Other upcoming fixes and tweaks include better ATI support (once ATI releases a new set of beta Catalyst drivers), a major fix for NVIDIA 7900 series cards (again, once NVIDIA solves the issue), and news that Rockstar's "eliminated" the Mma10 error for those trying to use theRockstar Social Club... eliminated, that is, except for those people still experiencing it, in which case Rockstar "would like to know as much info as you can about it."

Grammatically incorrect, but sadly indicative of the whole affair.