[UPDATE] RAGE: It’s A Looker – Now With Extra Technical Support

10/09/2011|By: Mat C|Posted in: News12 Comments

Over the course of this weekend, it’s almost seemed as though I’ve spent as much time tweaking RAGE as I have actually playing RAGE. If you’ve been following the launch of the PC version, you’ll know that it’s just that sort of game. The beauty of PC gaming however is that as much as these inconveniences can frustrate and annoy, the rewards are often so great for those who invest the time to fix their own experience. What arrived on my hard drive as a stuttering and inconsistent mess on Friday is now a beautifully refined masterpiece by Sunday; the default popping in textures and unstable frame rates replaced by a consistent FPS outdoors as well as in and not a trace of pop-in no matter how fast I turn my mouse.

[UPDATE]: I’ve had a couple of emails from folks asking what my set up is and how I achieved a stable 60 frames per second with no noticeable texture pop in. The truth is I don’t know. I kind of stumbled across it yesterday afternoon while drinking a cup of tea. I will however try and explain how I roughly got there after the break.

It’s truly something to behold, and it’s mostly thanks to the Megatexture technology employed by id Software to such startling effect. But although Megatextures are responsible for so much that is right about RAGE‘s visuals, the tech also plays a role in some of the game’s quirks and flaws. By blanketing the whole world in a single enormous texture quilt, some of the finer details become a little lost in translation, with smaller items and ornaments drawn into the world and lacking the subtle interaction that can make an environment feel alive. Hug some walls too closely and much of the texture work appears muddy and washed out at a glance. At its best however, RAGE looks breathtakingly beautiful. Walking through the open wasteland feels like stepping through an oil painting or a work of art, with vivid colours and an illuminating sky box creating one of the most visually striking experiences our industry has to offer.

Nowhere is this captured more profoundly than at videogame ~~pornographers~~ tourists Dead End Thrills, who have compiled one hundred of the best 1920 x 1080 stills of RAGE you’re likely to see this side of Wellspring. If you’re familiar with the art of games such as Brink, Crysis and Mirror’s Edge, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Dead End Thrills before. Their RAGE collection is well worth a second look.

Now for the technical stuff, by popular request and presented to you by a fool who barely knows what he’s doing:

My Rig: i5 @ 2500k, 4GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 560ti with 1GB of VRAM.
Custom Config: You’ll want to download this file and place it in your valve\steam\steamapps\common\rage\base folder. Theoretically, this is what will fix your texture pop in and also greatly improve the texture quality.
Hard Drive Cache: To create a place for your RAGE cache files, either download this file or create your own at C:\users\username\AppData\local\id Software\Rage. As soon as you boot up the game for the first time, RAGE will save two files in here. Check to make sure. This should help with stuttering, freezing and a number of other potential issues.
Still Stuck?: This thread at the Steam forums will help you. You should also check out this thread if you have an older graphics card with below 1GB of VRAM, or if you have a fancy 1.5GB+ GPU and want to try pushing RAGE even further.
My In Game Settings: The official patch released yesterday by id adds a few more adjustable graphics settings, but I’ve actually found my performance to be better when I leave them alone. Infact, toggling some of them even crashed the entire game for me. I currently have VSync turned Off (but always enabled on my Nvidia control panel), Texture Cache at Small and Anisotropic Filter Off. I also have Anti-Aliasing set to 4x. Interestingly enough, my frame rates only ever peaked at 30fps when playing outdoors when this was set to off or 2x. At 4x however, this jumped upto 60fps and maintains that indoors, outdoors and regardless of the intensity of the action on screen. This seems a little odd to me, but I can’t complain with something that works. Attempting to change to 8x and 16x crashed RAGE on both occasions.

That’s my set up, my configuration and how I managed to achieve a stable 60fps at all times without any texture pop in after the initial load sequence. Judging by feedback on forums elsewhere, RAGE is a pretty complex beast capable of some very strange behaviour. What works for me might not work for you or your hardware. All I can do is share the wealth and if anyone benefits from that then happy days. All necessary credit goes to JK_DC of the Steam forums, to RockPaperShotgun for bringing said Steam thread to my attention and to the good people of NeoGAF for their continued technical support. I accept no responsibility for any explosions that might happen to singe your eyebrows as a result of this post.

Email the author of this post at matc@tap-repeatedly.com

12 Responses to [UPDATE] RAGE: It’s A Looker – Now With Extra Technical Support

Matt "Steerpike" Sakey 10/09/2011

Rage truly is a visually stunning game, and a tight, slick shooter experience as well. I've been enjoying it enormously, due in no small part to the fact that id apparently finally hired someone literate to write a story and color dialogue. Rage's overt silliness rings far more true than that in Borderlands, and the result is a more coherent, fun-to-play experience. Glad you got it working well, Mat! Those in the Alliance of Awesome Steam Group should put together some multiplayer some time. More a lover than a fighter, I prefer co-op, and I'd love to see how Rage manages in that area.
Gregg B 10/10/2011

Bwab bwab. Those Dead End Thrills pics look a bit nice. I've had their (his? her?) site open for months and the moment I close the tab, RAGE screenshots get posted up! It warms my heart Mat that you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty to get the most from a PC game ;-)
Gregg B 10/10/2011

And it seems just after your weekend of pissing about with config files id release a patch that allows you to tweak the graphics in-game. D'oh.
Mat 10/10/2011

The patch actually threw things off for me. On Saturday I got the game running without any pop in and 60fps indoors, but outside it was peaking at 30. The patch actually disrupted the textures so I was getting pop in again, and there was nothing the in game options could do to fix it (infact toggling some of them just crashed the game completely). After some further tweeking the game is now running with NO texture pop in at all after the initial load and runs at a flat 60fps in all situations. Shit feels good, man.. As a game im having a blast with RAGE. The shooting itself is the best I've played for years and im loving the wasteland. Its a shame we don't have a game as open as Fallout that looks this good, but even as a fairly linear hub system I've no problem with how RAGE plays. Feels great to me.
Bronte 10/10/2011

It sucks that RAGE was so buggy on the PC. It sucks worse that one of the greatest champions of PC gaming, Carmack, has all but accepted defeat at the hands of consoles. Why Carmack! Why?
Matt "Steerpike" Sakey 10/10/2011

I hear ya, Bronte... though I guess I can understand id's position. Games are a business, after all, and the audiences are larger on consoles. At the same time, though, his statement to Kotaku made it clear that they're not abandoning the PC at all, just recognizing that it makes better business sense to give some priority to the leading platforms.
Armand 10/10/2011

"The beauty of PC gaming however is that as much as these inconveniences can frustrate and annoy, the rewards are often so great for those who invest the time to fix their own experience." I just can't agree with that Steerpike. That was the reality and truth of PC gaming in the late 80's and the 90's. Nowadays, I haven't had to tweak a game file to get it to run on my rig since services like Steam made PC gaming just as convenient (if not more so) as classic console gaming. A game that requires so many 3rd party downloads and tweaks like you mention today is just wrong. Id dropped the ball here, and in a big way that feels like a slap in the face. RAGE should have shined on the PC. Instead, it's yet another example of the old guard abandoning the format in favor of the console's promise of a quick buck. One more reason to turn to the new crop of indies who truly make the PC shine! (end rant)
Mat 10/11/2011

It was me Armand, not Steerpike.. If you've not had to tweak a file to get any of your games running fine then you've been very lucky. As far as I can see, custom tweaking files is still a big part of PC gaming, be it a simple FOV fix or messing around with config files. id did drop the ball with the PC launch, yes, but it only takes a small amount of fixing to get upto speed. According to some users, id's patch was enough to fix the game for them even though it still gave me some hiccups, without doing ANY tweaking themselves. Obviously it would be nice if everything worked as we wanted off the bat, but I don't think that's going to be a reality for everyone who plays games on a PC. Some people still regularly have to play with their settings.
Armand 10/11/2011

::facepalm:: Yes, it was you Mat. :P My response was written more with Steerpike's gaming history in mind, and would have been different had I known (taken a half second to look) that it was you. I do agree though that yes, there is still some minor tweaking needed to get a game to run once in a while on a PC, or more appropriately, to optimize a game to a greater degree or to your machine. What I was going for though is, back in the day, the degree of tweaking bordered on having to learn computer languages and coding just to get something to run on a machine that had no right running it. It was common practice to spend hours, if not a day or two, to get a game to work. It's something I for one do not miss. These last few years, PC gaming has become so much more streamlined though, and I think it's one of the best things to happen on the platform. When I hear about you spending all weekend trying to get a game to work right, a game created by one of the old-school PC development powerhouses, it's just upsetting. It feels like a step back for the PC, damaging some of the progress we've made by spitting in our eyes. Maybe, just maybe, there was a legitimate reason for RAGE's failures, but I hope I don't hear they just didn't play test it properly, or on enough machines, or if they never tried it on an ATI card or something like that...
Mat C 10/11/2011

I get you, Armand. I don't think there's any question that PC gaming has become so much more refined almost beyond recognition in alot of ways. I don't know if I'd be a PC gamer if it wasn't for Steam. I think my point was is that it's nice to have the choice to fix things when they aren't quite right. Unfortunately we do still get these quirks with new releases, but it's great to know that there is a community out there willing to fix these things even before the developers do. When you've only ever owned consoles for as long as I have, that's a fact of monumental brilliance. Community fixes sure as hell beat the process of waiting for an official patch (which doesn't always come) and Sony & Microsoft's certification process. For what it's worth, even in worst case scenario's I think it's alot easier to fix PC games than it has been in the past. RAGE received a significant backlash for it's technical performance, but once you know how to do it it's a 5 minute job, max. I'm literally an idiot when it comes to stuff like this and it took me a couple of minutes to completely stabilise one of the most unstable major PC releases in quite a while. There's so much technical support out there these days that it's hard to go wrong. But essentially you are right. It's disappointing that id of all studio's have made these mistakes with the PC version of their game.
Matt "Steerpike" Sakey 10/11/2011

You can tell Mat by that suspicious missing T in his name. For the record, Armand, I'm right there with you - spending a weekend getting a game to work is not something I want to do. Call me spoiled, but I expect my games to work out of the box, with maybe a few tweaks here and there to optimize, not make it work in the first place. Hey, if you're a tweaker who loves that stuff, bless you... and it was nice of id to release some tools that help you do it. But all in all I don't miss the days of boot disks and config.sys files. I can't say for sure, but I'm betting a lot of people are blaming id for the wrong reasons. I have little doubt that the game was adequately tested, and I'm inclined to believe Carmack when he says the problem lay in the drivers from the major videocard companies. First, bad drivers; then, subsequent new driver release foul-ups. Those who want to blame id, at least do it for the right reason: they didn't release a broken game, they released a game stubbornly shackled to an antiquated (in this space) technology and philosophy long since abandoned by the rest of game development. Rage is an OpenGL game. OpenGL has not been a priority in the gaming space for years and years; and while neither nVidia nor ATI are famous for putting great programming effort into their drivers period, it can't have improved things that id still pointlessly insists on using a technology that fell out of favor in game development more than a decade ago. It was time to let this fight go in 2001. That id still continues it today is probably why Rage had so many issues at launch. I understand Carmack's complaints about DirectX, but I'd bet a modest sum of Malaysian Ringitts that these launch troubles wouldn't have been as serious were Rage a DirectX game. Lots of people are pillorying Carmack for telling the truth: that the PC is not the dominant platform for games, and that consoles have larger audiences. I roll my eyes at those people, because not only is Carmack correct (we may hate it, but that don't make it not so), but because if you look at Rage running correctly on a PC, could anyone honestly say that corners were cut in favor of the console versions? Rage is one of the best-looking games I've ever seen, and (again, when it's running right) it's a blammo 60fps. My own aging rig runs it beautifully. Texture pop is annoying but hardly the crime of the century. To call Rage a cheap console port is to misunderstand the meaning of that complaint. So far as I can tell, driver issues and OpenGL stubbornness aside, in Tech 5 id created something no one else has - an engine that maximizes itself across all three major platforms with the same assets, and no significant sacrifice to accommodate the limitations of one over the other. My view is that id's decision to cling to OpenGL is a major culprit, but beyond that I see nothing to fault in Rage. A solid business decision - hit the targets with the largest potential audiences - can't be faulted. Especially when that decision wouldn't have detracted from the PC experience in the slightest, were it not for crap drivers and a stupid base technology choice.
Armand 10/11/2011

Yeah, my initial response was me assuming it was you Steerpike as I know you'd been playing it, and I just assumed. And we all know what assuming does. Or something. It was a comment that didn't fit my perception of where you are in your views of gaming, so I just sort of... over reacted. About Carmack, his comments about the PC not being a dominant platfrom, by me, was met by a "well, duh!" And I for one do not, in the least, mind console ports to PCs. I want more console games ported to PCs, and as long as they just do it halfway right, I'm fine with it. That said, I still think it was Id's responsibility to make sure their game worked at launch. It's not like this was the first time they were looking at nVidia and ATI drivers. They must have known what was out there. How could they have missed this? It just suggests half-assed checkups on their part. This isn't nVidia or ATI's fault. Most games work fine on their drivers. In fact, EVERY game I own works fine on their drivers. If no one else is dropping the ball, than why a classic PC gaming company like Id?