[PC] RAGE

i am impressed how the game runs smooth almost at same level smoothness as hard reset

 

Thats right it's IDs fault. Streaming from a DVD but failing vs HDDs that are so much faster then factor in lots of RAM/VRAM to buffer data and tons more CPU perfomance and bandwidth.

That said game looks FUGLY upclose. Hello year [strike]2005[/strike] 2003.

 

The game runs fine on plenty of systems. Whatever is wrong, it's not the technology, there's another bottleneck in those systems somewhere - drivers, API, anything.
Besides, whatever videos from console versions you've seen, those were all HDD installs as well. Streaming from DVD is slow and ugly on consoles.


Oh, and the game looks utterly beautiful.

 

There's no reason AT ALL for this problem on PC....No if's and no but's...

And to top it off the games looks like ass!!!

 

The hell there isn't. Carmack spent 30 minutes of his Quakecon talk discussing all the various problems.

If anything, it's the consoles that are guaranteed to be free of any such trouble. Rage is the perfect demonstration of why those systems are so much reliable as a platform.

 

BTW AMD has not supposedly released the driver they meant to
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

Unfortunately some people are saying the version is the same so if you already installed the wrong one then the right one will not automatically overwrite it. If so you need to do a custom install. People are saying it fixes most of the problems.

http://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator

It sounds like what probably happened is they had the BF3 driver and the RAGE driver and then they merged them to release, but merged in the wrong rage driver. I say that b/c they say this one is only the correct rage driver and a unified one will later be released (although maybe that is just to include all the old products, not entirely sure)

 

You seem to be confusing inherent overheads with the PC model with broken drivers / game engine. No one's denying that API and driver overheads exist on the PC. And yes Carmack explained some of the difficulties in optimising for the PC in relation to the consoles. But none of these things even come close to accounting for the kind of performance we are seeing here.

This is not a general PC architecture/API/driver model inferiority, its something broken, pure and simple. Now it seems more likely that what is broken is the AMD driver but if in fact the engine is generally failing to obliterate console performance on everything from a 8800GTX/4850 onwards then a very poor implementation is to blame, not the PC model. Otherwise, no game would ever perform better on that level of GPU and virtually all do.

That said, I'm not ready to blame Id just yet until we see the new AMD driver. And I also think the game looks pretty nice from what I've seen although I haven't played it myself yet.

 

Custom drivers per game is a huge problem in itself.

 

I agree and generally it's not required. I haven't updated my drivers once since purchasing my 4890 what must be a couple of years ago now. Usually driver updates are only for that extra bit of performance which matter more to review sites benchmarking the game than to actual gamers.

I've actually not encountered a game being genuinly broken like this on recent drivers in a long time. That in itself doesn't bode well for the QA performed on Rage. That is unless this is genuinly down to an actual broken driver being released by AMD which if it's a one off mistake could be forgiven.

 

quoted for extreme truthness. 2011 and we are still shipping code at the 11th hour. Someone gift Microsoft Project to id+AMD.

Sxotty: that's a great moment. Is that a random occurrence? The fact someone was waiting for it tells me it's probably scripted (or highly probable).

Well, the game was having problems before the botched driver. NV users are also reporting similar problems (but in a much lower number). If Rage required a particular driver version they should have had a driver version check at start just like the BF3 beta. It's a beginners mistake tbh.

everyone: pics or it didn't happen. Saying the game looks like roadkill or an angel's wings is pointless without some sort of evidence, no matter how subjective the analysis might be.

 

The problem with that argument is that there are plenty of videos of perfectly OK performance with reasonable hardware configurations. So I reiterate: the technology is fine, whatever is causing the trouble is an external factor.

 

Gameplay footage -- GTX460 1GB and 280.26 WHQL driver:

 

So, I'd like to see an explanation for how that supposedly broken engine manages to run without any visible problems on that system...

Granted, we don't know if it can make it to 60fps, but I don't see much of the ATI related issues there. I'd be happy to run the game like that on my PC, maybe I'll get it (lost my Steam password years ago though...)

Edit: just noticed the FPS counter, apparently it's close to 60 most of the time, too.

 

I have to say the outdoor areas really look great. The canyons are rather amazing actually. Yeah some of the textures in the game are pretty bad but overall the scene quality can really be in a class of its own.

BTW, GPUZ says 640MB dedicated memory usage and ~350MB dynamic memory usage. 1920x1080 4X AA.

I installed the AMD hotfix drivers and they sped the game up maybe 3x what it was before. I sit at 60Hz now with vsync forced in CCC. It stutters a little but it's not too bad really. But the texture pop in is absolutely still there in full force.

Here are two videos of what I'm seeing. Ignore how they aren't smooth. FRAPS does that. The thing to watch for is pop in even with slow turning and how it repeats even in a small arc. I don't know if this is how the engine is supposed to be or if it's more driver problems but yikes.

 

That blue vending machine and orange door at 1:15 look so bad texture wise.... In fact the whole game has bad textures in most places!

 

All I see is loads of polygon edges, Blurry low detailed textures, Everything looks flat..... It's not a very impressive looking game at all, Looks like it's from 2-3 years ago and then that's being generous as we had Crysis and STALKER : Clear Sky back then!

Complete rubbish considering it's running on brand new tech...

 

Well it is targeting old hardware primarily. I do think that the outdoor areas can look pretty great thanks to the unique texturing on the rock faces and such. Especially from a distance. But yeah there is a lot of low poly modeling and low rez texturing abound. The problem I have has nothing to do with the models or texturing, but is how I am continuously shown texture pop-in everywhere even with the slightest turn (see my captures above).

I wouldn't say any of the STALKER games look better. They have dynamic lighting and shadowing (albeit blocky) but the texturing and modeling of those games is not so hot. They also all stutter frequently. Played those to death.

 

I haven't even done that mission, but the mutants do appear to like to crawl along pipes and things so that is totally possible. Though the geometry may well have a tag that says "crawl along me".

The falling down thing is what makes it likely the whole thing is scripted, but death animations and shooting them also makes them fall so who knows for sure. And I apologize to anyone I am offending by greatly enjoying it, but I also like silly racing games like Rush for n64 (though I may be confusing it with something else). I find the driving pretty fun though and a nice break between things. I just wish there were more of the express missions.

BTW the racing game I am thinking of had good control in the air and ridiculous jumps, the second installment went stupid and added wings which I did not like So if you know what it was let me know

edit:
@ Swaaye did you just load the game before that? I noticed when I first loaded there was more popin then after I played a bit. I think it allows you to start b4 all the textures are ready or something. Of course I have transcoding/nvidia so it could be completely different. I had just noticed b/c I thought gee what is everyone complaining about. Then I loaded a save after doing other things and was taken aback at first in well spring (where the save was), but it started acting normal in about 20s. The spot you show could be surprisingly bad since you are changing from the entire world being loaded outside and he cabinets. In other places you are contained and cannot see the entire wasteland. I kind of like the way it is though instead of the elder scrolls way where you load interiors separate which isn't as fun IMO. There is still some noticeable texture stuff going on, but it isn't bothering me too much. I hope some people make some race mods for this b/c it needs more driving still

 

@Sxotty/swaaye
Is the texture pop only present on your AMD rig, or is it also present on your nVidia rig?

 

Nothing special about 60FPS, as long as the load is light enough.

And overheads are overblown, if overheads have such a huge effect then why do games like Crysis 2 run about 8x faster than on consoles at the same settings on a PC that is about 8x faster?

Also we have the fact that the rage mega texture system has a tile cache greatly large enough to store the high lod textures for a full 360 around the player at 1080P, no overheads would make the cache smaller.