[swaaye]

Even if they double what we have I wonder how much of an improvement if would be. 50GB download anyone? Carmack said in his talk that they have terabytes of art over there.

[HMBR]

Rage is 100% unplayable on my PC,
on XP with 10.9 there is some artifacts and the pop in is awful, whenever you move the mouse, even if slowly,
on windows 7 is even worse, the game just freezes for a long period before working for a second or so, installing the Rage performance driver helped a bit, the artifacts are gone but the freezing remains...
the funny thing is that on XP is much better (no freezing), but the pop in still awful and AMD didn't release the Rage driver for XP...............

[swaaye]

While id says XP SP3 is supported, if the graphics companies don't release drivers you are out of luck. On 7 you need that beta driver but even then AMD has problems. NV works fine though. Supposedly more new drivers are forthcoming.

[Billy Idol]

So...should I buy the game on my PC? I have a 480GTX...and am interested in the game, as it looked great back at gamescom...however I don't want to spend all time tweaking some settings...and I don't want those texture pop ins either!

should I buy a hardcopy and install the game on my SSD (would this improve texture performance?)...my steam folder is on the standard HDD as I only have 60Gig SSD, and I am not sure if I can change the folder for RAGE download in steam...

[kyleb]

It's a Steamworks game, so it's going in a Steam folder either regardless of if you download it or buy retail. That said, I'd bet you could copy the necessary Steam and game files to your SSD and run it from that. I doubt you'd feel the need though, as I've only seen very minor pop in with my GTX 470 and standard drives.

[gamervivek]

Originally Posted by HMBR

Rage is 100% unplayable on my PC,
on XP with 10.9 there is some artifacts and the pop in is awful, whenever you move the mouse, even if slowly,
on windows 7 is even worse, the game just freezes for a long period before working for a second or so, installing the Rage performance driver helped a bit, the artifacts are gone but the freezing remains...
the funny thing is that on XP is much better (no freezing), but the pop in still awful and AMD didn't release the Rage driver for XP...............

what card do you have? It seems like a 48xx problem.
Only thing that works is to use 11.9 drivers on win 7 and disable catalyst AI. though the fps tanks.

[Malo]

Originally Posted by kyleb

It's a Steamworks game, so it's going in a Steam folder either regardless of if you download it or buy retail. That said, I'd bet you could copy the necessary Steam and game files to your SSD and run it from that. I doubt you'd feel the need though, as I've only seen very minor pop in with my GTX 470 and standard drives.

What about symlinking the game directory from the steamapps to a folder on his ssd, would that work?

[Billy Idol]

just bought it via steam...downloading at 11.8MB/s ... yeah, me likes my 100MBit connection

my local gamestop (those idiots) did not have a ICO&Shadow of the Colossus copy left for me...so RAGE it is then...wonder how this game turns out...

[Sxotty]

Originally Posted by slapnutz

I hope they will iron it out in time however this makes me wonder, if some people have bad texture pop-in now, what happens to that whole request for a higher Texture res pack from the PC crowd?

Wouldn't that just make it worse?

Actually I thought about that at the very beginning of all this whining and think it fairly likely they wont bother releasing it since people with slow PCs and crappy drivers will just bitch and moan about it. Remember Crysis? People threw a fit b/c they could not max it out. I did not want to post it b/c if it hadn't crossed their minds yet I did not want to plant the seed.

Originally Posted by Farid

True, but it would defeat the whole point of having an opening post that describes, albeit sarcastically, the game. And I didn't erase from the board the existing posts.

Yeah but since you did not actually play it your description is lacking It is better when someone actually has experience.

[HMBR]

AMD is still releasing regularly new drivers for XP, I was using the same 11.9 version on both,
and on XP it's noticeable better, a lot less freezing, but with artifacts and huge pop in problems,
but AMD only released their new "Rage fix" driver for win7, but anyway, it's not useful for me, because while it solved the artifacts the huge freezes are still there and a lot worse than on XP with the "old" driver, it's completely unplayable
I'm using a HD5750...

[bigtabs]

Terabytes of texture data sitting on an OnLive server would be great... if your connection didn't compress the shit out of it. Maybe megatexture will be the answer when services like OnLive have the framework they need.

[Malo]

There's a difference between not being able to run at high settings and having to deal with the texture pop-in. Having a screen full of gourad shading for 500ms every time you happen to turn sharply isn't exactly the same as not having motion blur, enhanced god rays or pom. This engine on PC seems to only work well on higher end PC's.

[Psycho]

Originally Posted by swaaye

There is a post somewhere (a link in the other thread) where it was mentioned that OpenCL had performance problems so they gave up on it. They started with CUDA C and then tried to use OpenCL too. NVIDIA doesn't care about or need OpenCL so blame AMD, I guess.http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=2...#item_26824104

Looks more like they are saying that they only got a cuda version, because the _nvidia_ opencl compiler was worse than the cuda one when they tried (shouldn't come as a surprise..) - no word about on non-cuda hardware. So they must be happy by only supporting half of the (potential...) customer base.

Ofcourse it could also be that it simply turned out the gpu version wasn't all that much faster, and not worth doing in the first place (and therefore not worth spending the additional 10-20% on a opencl port).

[hoho]

Originally Posted by Psycho

So they must be happy by only supporting half of the (potential...) customer base.

If steam survey is anything to go by then going with Cuda-only covers nearly 60% of all gamers with AMD and Intel making up 33 and 6% respectively.

[tongue_of_colicab]

Originally Posted by Malo

There's a difference between not being able to run at high settings and having to deal with the texture pop-in. Having a screen full of gourad shading for 500ms every time you happen to turn sharply isn't exactly the same as not having motion blur, enhanced god rays or pom. This engine on PC seems to only work well on higher end PC's.

Lol thats gonna be fun with my 4870 than.

Btw +1 for your porcupine tree sig

[Sxotty]

Here is someones review

RAGE, at its core, is a shooter. It wasn't advertising something that it isn't, and if players earned that impression, it was likely at the fault of early hype of outside sources (from previews to interviews to early demos). It's a shooter just like Doom 3 with the same general drive. You'll have missions or tasks, but they're little more than excuses to go out and shoot and just generally have fun with the game. There are no RPG elements such as leveling and stat-points, and it's not as open of a world as it first looks, so do not expect and do not compare it to Fallout or Borderlands like many reviewers and gamers have.

There is a story to RAGE that's never fully developed in-game and to those who enjoy learning the background details and lore, there may be some disappointment. Nowhere in the game, outside of one tidbit at the start from the game's now deceased president and NPC conversations, are there e-mails, papers, data logs, journals, etc. that log any form of lore or story for the player to learn. You never learn about so-and-so's history or how this and that happened, you simply make assumptions as you go and that's that. While there's a fair share of sights to see, there's a lot of wondering about what those sights actually are and how they came to be. While in some regard, you can make a logical assumption that this is because you woke up after a hundred years since the world's destruction and there's a lot to fill in an not a whole lot of time, the general pacing of the game can be frustrating with how little you know and are told versus how much you want to know about the game.

The shooting elements are where the core of the game resides, offering some of the best gunplay I've seen yet. Enemies really do react to your bullets in fun and interesting ways, and seeing a mutant trip and slam its head into something as a result of shooting its legs adds to the experience. All the guns available to you, while not all interesting, have different uses and ammunition available to them with the same general goal: killing. There are a variety of enemies in the game, all falling under different bandit clans, mutants, and a mysterious Authority, and each have different styles of combat and weapons they use to fight. Repetition of enemy skins falling under a certain faction isn't entirely noticeable in the heat of battle, but you may find yourself looting the same corpse a few times, or very often.

Racing, a main feature of the game, is fun, hectic, explosive, and chaotic. Rough play is encouraged, and there's no such thing as bad manners in a race where destroying the competition is mandatory. There are no-weapon races, and different forms of racing outside of running laps where you collect rally points and just flat out destroy other vehicles to win. The Rally racing can be frustrating at times due to how the opposing AI will predict that a point will be taken and sneak off to another rally point's spawn location and gain a lead that's frustrating and hard to prevent if you're trying to actually race on the designed track. Apart from that, all forms of racing are still fun and offer a distraction from the main shooting elements.


On a personal level, however, I found the game to be almost disappointingly easy, for various reasons (POSSIBLE SPOILERS):

1) Often times, you'll always be fighting your opponents at very close ranges or very long ranges behind cover, and many of the weapons available are too good at placing a one-shot kill, be it a shotgun, sniper rifle, crossbow, or even your starter pistol.
2) Armor upgrades nullify an astonishing amount of damage you'll receive to the point where you're almost encouraged not to buy them if you want an actual challenge. With them, there's very little fear of getting into melee with mutants, or even charging a group with a shotgun, and dying becomes rare to the point where you have to deliberately put yourself in a position where death is even possible.
3) Returning to 1, ammunition available can be downright ridiculous and unfair, taking down even some of the toughest enemies with relative ease, diminishing the fear and stress factors that were even put into their appearances. Crossbow and shotgun ammunition that explodes tends to one shot most enemies, pistol ammunition allows you to safely play through the game with the pistol alone without much challenge at all. If you purchased the game new with the Anarchy pack, offering a bonus armor, fist weapon, and double-shotgun, you'll find that these offers are akin to many over-powered pre-order items available for other games.
4) The Wingstick is, in and of itself, the strongest and cheapest weapon in the game. Throwing it will almost always end in a one-shot kill against non-heavily armored enemies. It can stick in their head or even fly back to you, with a chance of failure and breaking, allowing you free kills without any ammunition use. : Later upgrading it can allow it to hit up to three total enemies in close to medium quarters, making an already strong weapon too good to the point where you'll refuse to use it solely because it makes the game too easy.
5) Crafting in the game is fun and interesting, rewarding scavenging early on, but you'll later come to a point where, coupled with what you find in your playthrough, you'll be able to earn enough money to afford more than enough parts and ammo to play through any mission without fear of running out.

Tips I can offer to avoid some of these issues are not buying any armor upgrades, playing on Nightmare, and avoiding any special ammunition types unless the situation absolutely calls for it. Otherwise, you'll find this to just be a fun arcade shooter with no challenge.

Regardless of those factors, the game is still very enjoyable and side mini-games, such as gambling, racing, five finger fillet, card games, and other jobs from the job board all add up to make just a plain old fun shooter with some flaws that bog it down. It doesn't have an epic narrative, and its pacing is too fast for what little information you gain in between tasks on the story and the meaning behind each action. It's fun, it's of decent length, and it's what you make of it. Just don't set your expectations high in the sky, as you may be disappointed in some areas. But at its core, it's an id Software shooter, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in a beautiful and memorable shooter

I find that funny compared to Kyle's experience

God it just keeps getting worse. I had finished a mission, call is mission A, completed the next mission beyond that, mission B, and was on to mission C. Got killed, I had not saved....it kicked me all the way back to mission A. RAGEON

So you have the ability to respawn after you die immediately with defib, and you can save at any point you want. I started on normal and only really died when I drove off a cliff into the abyss, but I changed to hard and it was about right for me.

[gamervivek]

Originally Posted by HMBR

AMD is still releasing regularly new drivers for XP, I was using the same 11.9 version on both,
and on XP it's noticeable better, a lot less freezing, but with artifacts and huge pop in problems,
but AMD only released their new "Rage fix" driver for win7, but anyway, it's not useful for me, because while it solved the artifacts the huge freezes are still there and a lot worse than on XP with the "old" driver, it's completely unplayable
I'm using a HD5750...

yeah I was going by replies on the steam forums and my own.
20fps on 11.9 with a 4850 AI off Win7(everything displays correctly and no freezes)

But same problem with other ATI cards.

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php...stant-freezes/

other culprit seems to be dual cores

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php...t__p__18756584

[Malo]

Originally Posted by hoho

If steam survey is anything to go by then going with Cuda-only covers nearly 60% of all gamers with AMD and Intel making up 33 and 6% respectively.

Are you counting ALL Nvidia's marketshare? Isn't the CUDA support only for the latest generation or 2 of Nvidia GPUs?

[Sxotty]

BTW this is what rock paper shotgun says about the PC version
(though Farid quoted the person known as Ben instead who has very strange ideas about what a good game makes)
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011...age-pc-review/

If you don’t ever play its Dead City level you won’t see what might just be the most impressive and atmospheric mainstream videogame sight this year.

It’d be easy to lament that this brilliant technology, once it’s working, is wasted on a mere shooter. True, I’d love to see id Tech 5 also put to use on something more wild and free, but I’m also very happy that it’s powering this shooter. Rage is often guilty of ordinariness and blandness in its main missinons, but it definitely pulls off being more than just a journey of unthinking destruction. The lengths it goes to for world and character design, and its refreshing lack of interference or handicapping in terms of its large and satisfying arsenal, results in something far and above most anything out or due out this year that’s predominantly based around moving a reticule over a man/mutant’s face. It has flow, it has character, it has life and it has stair-climbing friendly spider-bots. id have learned a lot, and without abandoning why we used to love them in the first place.

Anyway you really, really ought to play it at some point whether you wait until it gets cheaper or AMD gets their drivers fixed for OpenGl. If you choose not to play it b/c of all the whiners then you are doing yourself a diservice.

[Malo]

I'm actually considering buying it and playing on my wife's PC since she has the most recent upgrade. She has an i5 and a 6870 so once the AMD driver situation is rectified then it should perform ok. Texture issues aside, it is an amazing looking game from the screenshots. The detail and art really shows what their tech is capable of.

[Ike Turner]

BTW AMD users: id's PResident Todd Hollenshead confirmed that the new ATI drivers are coming today (he tweeted this 14 hours ago..so yesterday in the US):

http://twitter.com/#!/Thollenshead/s...23140720623617

Working to get the new ATI drivers up but won't happen tonight. Tomorrow for sure they tell me.

[Sxotty]

Originally Posted by Ike Turner

BTW AMD users: id's PResident Todd Hollenshead confirmed that the new ATI drivers are coming today (he tweeted this 14 hours ago..so yesterday in the US):

http://twitter.com/#!/Thollenshead/s...23140720623617

I am confused, why is id president saying what AMD will do? Shouldn't AMD be telling us what they will do?

[HMBR]

Originally Posted by gamervivek

yeah I was going by replies on the steam forums and my own.
20fps on 11.9 with a 4850 AI off Win7(everything displays correctly and no freezes)

But same problem with other ATI cards.

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php...stant-freezes/

other culprit seems to be dual cores

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php...t__p__18756584

I'm also running a dual core CPU, it's awful, but on XP it's MUCH, MUCH better than on Windows 7 for me, but the CPU usage is always 100%.

apart from the freezes the FPS seems good on XP, but the pop in is terrible, even if I turn around quite smoothly (I'm not just moving the mouse quickly to cause that, I'm trying to play at a natural speed) I can still clearly see the textures being loaded some x00ms later...

how can I disable AI? I can only set to performance, high and so on,
edit: tested it with AI off, and while it seems to have a positive effect on the freezes, pop in stays the same and now there are some "boxes" on some textures

[Malo]

Originally Posted by Sxotty

I am confused, why is id president saying what AMD will do? Shouldn't AMD be telling us what they will do?

When was the last time you ever saw any public responses from AMD for anything game related?

[Billy Idol]

Played for an hour or so...cool game!! Graphics are really nice! I have a 480GTX: 1080p 4xAA+GPUI trancoding enabled...I also forced v-sync via NVIDIA control panel and did the 8k config file stuff...no texture pop in at all for me, game looks good (exceept textures up close..really low res), nice world...starting to dig in slowly...nice game overall, non of those monster problems reported fortunately