d0x

I love Giantbomb..Ive never been a fan of Gamespot. I hope this works out, I hope they leave it alone and let it be what it is like they did with gamefaqs. Good luck to all!

@Franstone said:

Have you found an answer for the object flickering, texture loading, artifacting, and crashing?

; )

Hope the new AMD drivers that are supposedly coming tomorrow help.

Can't wait to play, major upset as far as releases go though.

Set your drivers to High Quality for whatever filtering options and optimizations you have. Also DO NOT force anisotropic filtering. Set it to application controlled.

This is the review I just posted to Giantbomb...

First off 90% of the graphical issues are due to drivers. They will be fixed so don't worry about that. I'm playing on a laptop which I hook up to my TV via HDMI. I run the game at 1080p with vsync on and 16x anti aliasing. It runs so smooth and overall looks really good. Towns and zones look a lot better than the wasteland overworld. Character models are incredible and so is the animation. They have some of the best skin textures I have ever seen in a game and their clothing is impressive as well. You also wont see very many (if any at all) models that share the same face as you would in other games. id went to great lengths to make sure characters were unique and look really good.

There have been lots of complaints about low res textures in the game. It must be understood what megatexture is and how it works. The Game world is created as one giant texture. Details are in effects stamped into the world. This means everything is unique. You wont see a repeated texture anywhere. Most games use repeating high res textures. Rage does not. The trade off here is alot of the textures are a lower resolution that we are used to in this day and age. The reason id had to use lower resolution stamped textures was installation size. Had they used the original high resolution assets the game would be over 1 terabyte in size. As I said before most games repeat the same high resolution textures over and over and doing that saves a lot of space but gives less variety. Rage has infinite variety at the cost of finite detail. Its possible that in the future id could release a game modification or upgrade that could replace a lot of the lower resolution textures with higher resolution assets. The main issue will be file size. As I said uncompressed the game would be 1 terabyte in size. Even at a high level of compression Rage is over 25 gigs. A middle ground could be reached and they could double the texture resolution the game currently uses and put it up for download. Even then the game would probably need another 40 to 60 gigs of hard drive space. The only way to distribute a file that large would be bittorrent.

The gameplay is really good. The shooting feels so smooth and perfect. id knows gunplay and rage does shooting better than just about any other game. The enemy AI is really good and can present a good challenge without being cheap. They will take cover, attempt to flank and sometimes run an hide. They feel very dynamic and no scenario feels like the one before. The path finding is excellent. I have never seen an AI get stuck on geometry or have a hard time navigating the area. All different types of enemies have different combat styles as well so it never gets old.

The crafting system is easy to use and pretty cool. You can make some good stuff. I focus on making different types of ammo for a variety of weapons. The driving parts of the game are solid. It controls pretty well and vehicles can be upgraded quite a bit with weapons, armor, engines, suspension, skins etc. Racing is pretty good too

The sound and voice acting is top notch as well. Rage has more story than most id games and its delivered via some quirky and interesting characters. The main issue is you just barely scratch the surface of who these people are which is a shame. Your character never speaks either and some details are left untold leaving you wondering why things are the way they are. id could have done a better job explaining the world these people live in and it was definitely a missed opportunity. The hope for the future lies in Bethesda. Bethesda bought out id not too long ago and hopefully their expertise in writing quality game stories will benefit future id games. I think the partnership happening too late into the development of Rage for it to have any effect on this game but Rage 2 is a whole new ballgame that I hope we get to see.

Honestly when you get right down to it Rage is alot of fun. There are alot of people complaining (mostly about technical details) but I think its being blown waaaay out of proportion. Get the game you really won't regret it. Its a solid shooter thats more throwback than future but as long as you know what to expect you wont be let down.

Assuming you are playing on PC do yourself a favor and configure the game via your graphics card control panel. Set Anisotropic Filtering to "Application Controlled" as Rage does not like Forced AF, it creates seams in the geometry. Also be sure to set your other filtering options to High Quality not High Performance. Oddly Rage not only looks better when set this way but it also runs better. Enjoy!

Mine is 3. The more the merrier

Yea AMD needs to get some proper drivers out quickly. Thats always been their problem, ATI made the best hardware but drivers were crap and nVidia made almost as good hardware but they have good drivers. Even without the above tweaks the game ran fine for me right off the bat with very minimal texture pop.

Hope you get it working. The game is alot of fun when its behaving

Also if your GPU has 2+ gigs of ram make a config file named "rageconfig.cfg" in "\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base" and put this in it.

seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 "16384"

seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly "16384"

seta vt_pageimagesizeunique "16384"

seta vt_pageimagesizevmtr "16384"

This will tell the engine that it can use more vram for textures that way it loads more of them into ram at any given moment which will reduce pop. If you have a GPU with less than 2 gigs of ram use these settings...

seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 "8192"

seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly "8192"

seta vt_pageimagesizeunique "8192"

seta vt_pageimagesizevmtr "8192"

Alot of tips and tweaks have been posted about how to get rage to run well but im going to throw my own 2 cents in. Im playing rage on my laptop at 1080p vsync (forced) on and 16xCSAA and the game runs perfectly smooth with no drops in frame rate and zero texture pop. Hardware wise I have...

Intel core i7 with 8 gigs of DDR system ram and an nVidia 555m GPU w/3 gigs on board ram. Not a bad system any means but it is a laptop so GPU wise its not as good as a desktop system with similar specs.

The first thing you need to do is create the cache folder. For some reason the game uses 1 gig of cache for quick texture loading but due to a bug it doesnt actually ever create the file unless you create the folder. The folder goes in /user/appdata/local/id software/rage. After you create the folder put "+fc_maxcachememoryMB 1024" in your launch options and next time the game loads it will create a cache file that will somewhat help with loading and texture streaming.

This is mostly for nvidia users but the same basics settings are also in the AMD control panel. You are going to want to make sure you set Aniostropic Filtering to Application Controlled. If you try to force 16x the game gets angry and you will see seams all over the geometry. Next set your Anti Aliasing to whatever you prefer. I have mine set to Enhance Application, 16x Quality CSAA and normal multisampling. Here is where things get interesting. You are going to want to set all your texture filtering options to High Quality and disable any options that say they improve performance with minimal loss of image quality. Its odd really because in Rage if you set your CP to high performance, performance or quality the game still looks fine but the frame rate takes a hit and you will have more texture pop. If you set it to High Quality the game looks better, it runs faster and it eliminates pretty much all cases of texture pop.

Since I changed my settings the game hasnt crashed once, it loads faster, there frame rate is rock solid at 60fps and there is no texture pop to be seen. Its a pretty easy fix too. Oh and if for some reason you havent already you need to get the latest drivers. Im using the newest nVidia beta drivers. I didnt try the game with anything else so I cant speak to how it improved things but from what everyone is complaining about it seems 90% of the games troubles are caused by the drivers not the game itself.

Now none of this will improved the low res looking textures. Thats really the best the game has to offer. The reason is because with megatexture everything is unique and with that the textures take up massive amounts of space on your hard drive. Carmack said the uncompressed textures for this game weigh in at a terrabyte. Most games use high res textures but those same textures are repeated over and over so that saves tons of space. In rage this isnt the case so we get a 100% unique world with no texture repeats but when you get close they dont look as good as we expect..well except on the models. The Character models are impressive.

Hopefully id releases the texture pack which would replace the medium to low res textures with something higher quality. The problem is the file size will be massive. IF they do it it will probably be at LEAST 20 more gigs. Here's hoping they do and to ease the punishing amount of bandwidth it will take they use bittorrent.

FTA "Considering how many different ways you can earn credits in Forza, the whole car token thing seems a little silly."

Mostly I agree with that statement however there have been times in Forza 3 where I didnt have a specific car in a specific class and it would have taken hours to gain the credits needed to buy it in game. I would spend under a hundred points to save myself some time in that case BUT only if I was very very far into the game. Im talking like 20 hours into the game here. I want to earn everything I can but once ive stopped playing the game daily then I dont mind cheating a bit. I played Forza 3 every day for almost a year. I have the Forza 3 limited edition leather seat with wheel mount...omg heaven lol!

@RE_Player92 said:

@d0x said:

All you people complaining really need to get a life.. Its simple really, if you dont like it dont buy it or use it! I just dont understand what the complaints are for. Yes pushing a button is really simple but sometimes in the heat of battle its probably easier to say it and dont pretend like you wouldnt want to switch during moments like that.

I agree with you but I laughed really hard reading that.

That was my intent. Inject a little dry humor into a pointless argument. Of course I wouldnt consider anything game related to be "heat of the battle" esque.

My real point is people are complaining about a complete and total non issue.

All you people complaining really need to get a life.. Its simple really, if you dont like it dont buy it or use it! I just dont understand what the complaints are for. Yes pushing a button is really simple but sometimes in the heat of battle its probably easier to say it and dont pretend like you wouldnt want to switch during moments like that.