[Malo]

More RAGE funnies

[Sxotty]

Originally Posted by swaaye

Actually you'll probably want a gamepad for the driving anyway. Particularly when you're racing / car battling. I got out my 360 PC pad.

What does the transcoding do, exactly? Does it speed up texture loading or some such? Honestly there is not that much difference between the experience on a GTX 560 or my 6950. I think the NV card might load textures a little faster but they still pop in regardless and it still needs forced vsync, and it still stutters when you are cruising your vehicle across the landscape and the HDD is being pounded. It stutters far less than say Oblivion though.

I haven't got a gamepad yet But I agree my driving would likely improve.

As far as transcoding it puts some of the processing load onto your GPU. So think PhysX. That means a GPU that struggles to put the game up at 60fps won't have extra power to use transcoding. It also appears that if you have excess CPU cores transcoding might not do much since the CPU can do it as well. I have a 6 core, but haven't checked yet how much it is using it. I might try it right now b/c I am curious.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Neb

Yes candy coating and white knighting will not do any good.

Bullshit. It's a decent game. If you haven't played it I suggest laying off the hate knighting.

If you want to play a true wreck, try out EYE.

[Neb]

Originally Posted by swaaye

Bullshit. It's a decent game. It's not perfect but which game is exactly?

You satisfied with your investment, think it runs and looks good for price/perfomance ratio?

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Neb

You satisfied with your investment, think it runs and looks good for price/perfomance ratio?

I think the outdoor areas look excellent. Some of the landscapes are almost photorealistic. I think the gameplay is probably better than Fallout 3 and Borderlands (for me anyway). The racing is fun. Some of the characters have been interesting.

The need to force vsync and the pop-in are the annoyances. The ugly textures are nothing new to multiplatform games. Crysis 1 even has the occasional shitty texturing.

Of course I don't think it's worth $60 but I decided to have a go at it simply because I've been curious about the unique texturing and it really does look extremely nice at times.

[almighty]

Create a config file in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base or in the BASE folder in general called rageconfig.cfg

The add these lines :

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4

Save and load the game up

[Malo]

http://www.geforce.com/News/articles...-simple-tweaks

Not long later, ‘angular graphics’ on the NeoGAF forum discovered that creating a .cfg configuration file in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base was the solution. Be aware, however, that you will almost certainly require a video card with 1.5GB of Video RAM to enable 8K textures, other graphical niceities and GPU Transcoding, though it may also work on systems with just 1GB of VRAM if said options are toned down.

Name the file rageconfig.cfg and add the following text using the Notepad application, located in All Programs > Accessories:

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4

[Mize]

PS3 has CUDA?

[swaaye]

Cool. Props to NVIDIA, I guess. AMD is awfully quiet but hopefully they can do something too.

[Davros]

John Carmack literally reversing the progress of the gaming industry
Hey Carmack's Reverse

Originally Posted by homerdog

LOL AMD driver department is such a failure.

Oi, you leave Bob alone. He tries his best.....

[Sxotty]

MY CPU load gets to 70% while driving about. So it uses roughly 4.2 cores worth (an AMD chip though so slower) and I have transcoding turned on with a 570. Maybe I should turn off transcoding and see what happens.

Any good idea about performance utilization logging? I just used the performance monitor on my second screen and watched the graph. But surely there is a way to get it to record/log results or a better program I should try?

BTW anyone found the easter eggs for quake and wolf yet? I know they both exist and what level they exist in ghost for wolf, gearhead/brit for quake and I still cant find them at all...

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Sxotty

Any good idea about performance utilization logging? I just used the performance monitor on my second screen and watched the graph. But surely there is a way to get it to record/log results or a better program I should try?

I use GPUZ on ATI and NVIDIA, or NVIDIA Inspector for NV too.

For CPU, I just use task manager or a sidebar gadget.

BTW, I've seen up to around 750MB VRAM usage. That means with even default settings that a 1GB card is fairly well utilized. This isn't another new game using 256MB VRAM.

Originally Posted by Sxotty

BTW anyone found the easter eggs for quake and wolf yet? I know they both exist and what level they exist in ghost for wolf, gearhead/brit for quake and I still cant find them at all...

There's the Doom soldier on the dash in the car in the beginning of the game. I've also seen and heard of various things from Fallout. I have also recognized some sound effects from Quake 2/3 or maybe Doom3.

[Malo]

Originally Posted by Davros

John Carmack literally reversing the progress of the gaming industry
Hey Carmack's Reverse

haha good one Davros.

Oi, you leave Bob alone. He tries his best.....

Bob here? Isn't he Nvidia?

[Davros]

Originally Posted by Sxotty

BTW anyone found the easter eggs for quake and wolf yet? I know they both exist and what level they exist in

http://kotaku.com/5846633/how-to-find-quake-inside-rage

http://kotaku.com/5846496/how-to-fin...-rage?tag=rage

[Sxotty]

Ok so with transcoding off I got up to 85% CPU utilization and averaged 70% driving about like a madman. With transcoding on I got 76% Max and 61% average.
(driving back and forth from wellspring to gearhead area both times)

I did not really notice a difference in the image, but I was also not paying great attention b/c I was looking at graphs
I think maybe later I will try to do a better job. I tried monitoring the processors individually, but there was a million options to choose from and they did not give a nice simple % like that unless I dug for the right property, and I probably would end up choosing the wrong one.

[Richard]

Sxotty: You should turn on transcoding. That will reduce the amount of pop-in, or rather the amount of time it takes for the game to decompress from HDD storage and recompress into DXT for the graphics card thus "stream" in the correct level of detail.

[pjbliverpool]

Originally Posted by Malo

So we can either play it fine on a $250 console, or spend $250 on an SSD, $250 on a decent Nvidia-only GPU (since both id's and AMD's QA/devrel sucks and apparently only Nvidia GPUs can possibly do transcoding in RAGE), and only use a console controller to make sure we don't spin around too fast, just to get the same experience?

I'm not sure it's quite that bad. Not that any PC gamer should ever have to but how does it play at 720p on these cards? And how does the texture pop in really compare to the console versions?

We know it's bad on the PC, but is it a PC issue or an engine issue?

I'd be suprised if my 4890 can't still get much more out of this game than a console so for me the choice is £40 for the game on console or £25 for the game on PC (I won't consider the fact I'd have to buy a console first since my 360 died about a year ago).

[fellix]

I really hope id could clean out this virtual texturing technique for Doom 4. From what we see in Rage now, it appears that some hybrid method would give better results for both wide open spaces and vistas and the closed corridors with every minute detail polished. But probably Carmack will stick to advancing MegaTexture as universal system, as this method is truly very developer friendly, especially given how easy and fast is multi-platform porting done with its auto-scaling features. Probably in the hands of more passioned designers and artists, the technology will shine in a better light -- id should stick with the engine development mostly.
Now, when we should expect MegaGeometry?

[swaaye]

PS3 looks similar to what I see on my GTX 560 with respect to texture loading. The slower gamepad movement prevents you from doing an instant 180 like with a mouse though so it's harder to get the worst case.

With regards to frame rate, the game is not that demanding. I run 2720x1536 with 4X AA (downsampled to 1360x768) and it maintains 60 fps unless the HDD causes stuttering. HDD streaming always causes problems with PC games thanks to Windows AFAIK.

[TheD]

Can someone tell me why it uses so much VRAM?
Wasn't the big draw card of megatexture is that it only needs a very small amount of VRAM because it only need to load the parts of the textures that you will see into the tile cache?

[pjbliverpool]

When it's working it works well at least! I guess we should wait until AMD get their act together with the drivers before we judge the game too harshly, I'm still picking it up anyway. If anything I'm more curious about how it will perform on my 4890 than the game itself!

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by TheD

Can someone tell me why it uses so much VRAM?
Wasn't the big draw card of megatexture is that it only needs a very small amount of VRAM because it only need to load the parts of the textures that you will see into the tile cache?

Probably because the game is so open and there are unique textures everywhere. The pop in surely tells that it could happily use much more VRAM.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by pjbliverpool

When it's working it works well at least! I guess we should wait until AMD get their act together with the drivers before we judge the game too harshly, I'm still picking it up anyway. If anything I'm more curious about how it will perform on my 4890 than the game itself!

When I didn't know about the hotfix drivers and was using 11.9, it ran terrible on my 6950. There was image corruption and it was running at about 20fps at 1920x1080.

But the hotfix jumped that to 60 fps. The game's vsync is still strange and so I force it in CCC, and AMD seems to have slower texture loading (maybe related to their lack of transcode). I am going to play it more on the 6950 later. I spent last evening on my TV with the GTX 560.

[Sxotty]

Originally Posted by Richard

Sxotty: You should turn on transcoding. That will reduce the amount of pop-in, or rather the amount of time it takes for the game to decompress from HDD storage and recompress into DXT for the graphics card thus "stream" in the correct level of detail.

I didn't notice a difference (with transcode), but as I said I wasn't paying super close attention, but it definitely wasn't obvious. The worst pop up I have gotten was vegetation at a certain corner when I drive fast thru there for some reason the plants always seem to pop in instead of grow right.

I am still very excited about the tech too, but I wonder if there might be a better trade off yet to be found. If storage was lightning fast, huge, and free this would be the best IMO, but it isn't. Given the reality of the situation I wonder if regular tiling textures could have a MT overlay that was faster to stream, like decals but more detailed. Rage is fun, and looks good to me, but I think a developer could do something even more interesting with MT. I don't know exactly what, but that is rather the point. It should enable other things we haven't seen yet. I can think of reasons it could be useful, but they would probably be to subtle for most gamers anyway so not sell well.

[TheD]

Originally Posted by swaaye

Probably because the game is so open and there are unique textures everywhere. The pop in surely tells that it could happily use much more VRAM.

That is not how megatexture works though, the textures are broken up into small tiles and the system only loads the tiles it needs for the frame (and AFAIK some tiles that you have looked at recently) into a texture in VRAM called the tile cache.
The tile cache in Rage on consoles is a 4096x4096 texture, on PCs it is meant to be 8192x8192, both a huge way off from 1GB in size.

sebbbi has a great post on it http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...7&postcount=39