RAGE: That's actually what you do when trying to get the PC version to work

You can go back to the first half on the PC, but lots of missions/dungeons are closed. After the end game you get credits and it dumps you to menu I think
 
Ah... so maybe they can add missions to both halves and have you launch from the menu to roam around?
 
I purchased, during one of many sales, Raxco's defragmenter, Perfect Disk.

Anyway, I get the occasional e-mail from them and here's a copy and paste of the meat of one I just opened. If i'm posting too much of it then maybe a mod will edit it.



[FONT=Arial,sans-serif]Many of our customers are avid PC gamers. PerfectDisk has even been called a "WoW Optimizer."

Following a long standing tradition of pioneering cutting edge 3D graphics, the wizards at id® Software have created RAGE™, a game where every surface is uniquely textured and literally hand-painted. RAGE™ presents gamers with a mesmerizing visual experience that features the kind of fast-paced FPS action that is sure to raise your blood pressure. However RAGE™ taxes your system hardware like no other game, requiring that your system stream gigabytes of unique texture data into memory as you navigate its post-apocalyptic landscape. In fact, the game is so uniquely textured that texture data files average a couple of hundred megabytes in size each, with some of the larger textures being well over 1GB in size. The entire game requires over 21GB of disk storage space to install.

Texture "Pop-In"
A flaw that occurs when a game's graphics engine fails to
preload textures as the player is in view of them. -GiantBomb.com​

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ibbnytrrhmgwvhphwbmrzwcprbwczbfvkchqtcbmvy-zmlpfdrzw.gif
RAGE texture pop-in before and after PerfectDisk​

Although you may be prepared to rain death upon your enemies in the world of RAGE™, your PC may not be. At QuakeCon 2011, gaming luminary and technical director of id® Software, John Carmack, explained during his keynote address that low latency disk access would be crucial to the visual presentation of RAGE™. Many gamers have encountered texture pop-in issues on their systems as a result of slow disk access caused by file fragmentation. The game requires that your system be equipped not only with a sufficiently fast enough video card, but with a hard drive that can deliver smooth sequential read performance. Luckily for you, PerfectDisk has been proven to maximize sequential read performance and minimize texture pop-in issues in RAGE™.
The patented SMARTPlacement™ technology featured in PerfectDisk allows it to properly defragment game data for fast access. This allows your system to present you with the smoothest visual presentation of RAGE™ that it is capable of. Watch our video demonstration of how PerfectDisk™ can help you optimize your gaming experience!

​

PerfectDisk Best Practices for Optimal Gameplay

To help gamers get the best RAGE™ experience possible, we’ve compiled the following list of best practices:

  • Install the STEAM™ PC client to a dedicated hard drive.
  • Defragment the hard drive using the SMARTPlacement™ algorithm found in PerfectDisk.
  • During gameplay, disable the following programs and Windows features on the hard drive:
    • Anti-virus scans
    • System Restore / VSS protection
    • Drive indexing
  • Shut down any other programs installed to the same drive.
  • Enable OptiWrite™ in PerfectDisk to prevent the game from fragmenting in the future as updates and downloadable content are released.
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Food for thought or are they cherry picking an isolated example?
 
I would never ever turn off my virus scanner. That thing is on 24/7. This isn't the old days where the only way you could get infected was by inserting a disc. What I would do, is make sure the virus scanner isn't scanning the megatexture file, every single time it is accessed. Most virus scanners have a way of listing files and directories that should not be scanned.
 
Babel-17 said:
I purchased, during one of many sales, Raxco's defragmenter, Perfect Disk.

Anyway, I get the occasional e-mail from them and here's a copy and paste of the meat of one I just opened. If i'm posting too much of it then maybe a mod will edit it.

...

Food for thought or are they cherry picking an isolated example?
Click to expand...

Best-case scenario it would be as good as an SSD, and plenty of people with SSDs were complaining about texture pop-in. Also, you have to think iD would have done a 64-bit build if HDD thrashing were an issue. Then again, wasn't HDD thrashing an issue? And why didn't iD do a 64-bit build?
 
Otto Dafe said:
Best-case scenario it would be as good as an SSD, and plenty of people with SSDs were complaining about texture pop-in. Also, you have to think iD would have done a 64-bit build if HDD thrashing were an issue. Then again, wasn't HDD thrashing an issue? And why didn't iD do a 64-bit build?
Click to expand...

There was no popin for me and I have a regular WD 1tB drive. When the drive was occupied doing a backup I could not play at all the popin was so bad. So yes HDD access is certainly an issue.
 
What helped the most was the patch with the large texture cache option. Combine that with NV GPU transcode on a fast GPU and the pop in is very minimal unless you turn really fast.

But with the way the game continuously accesses files, defragmenting can't be a bad idea. Just go get free MyDefrag tho.
 
Steam has a defragger built in. Right click on a game in the library, click on Properties - Local Files - Defragment Cache Files.

Maybe somebody could try using that and offering an impression.
 
Babel-17 said:
Steam has a defragger built in. Right click on a game in the library, click on Properties - Local Files - Defragment Cache Files.

Maybe somebody could try using that and offering an impression.
Click to expand...

Every time I analyze the cache files using that, Steam tells me there's no fragmentation. It's been that way for two years. I don't trust their defragmenter one bit.
 
I.S.T. said:
Every time I analyze the cache files using that, Steam tells me there's no fragmentation. It's been that way for two years. I don't trust their defragmenter one bit.
Click to expand...

It did defragment few games for me though:!: So it's not completely broken :D
 
Windows defrag ignores fragmented files once they are over 64MB in size. Maybe Steam is like that too.
 
I dunno, Valve's L4D2 is the same way, and that game is not like the other Source engine games. Rather than having a ton of content in a few files, it's spread over like, 10K or some such.
 
What I've found is that Steam seems to have it's own internal file 'structure' that it prefers to adhere to. If you defragment your game files via Steam, Steam is happy. However, Windows will report those files as fragmented, as it seems to want them to be somewhere else that 'conflicts' with what Steam wants.

I've always just kept my Steam directory excluded from defrags and have never had any performance issues related to fragmented files on my Steam games.

It's weird but, whatever works right?
 
I think the main thing Steam will do that causes fragmentation is its decryption of a preloaded game. I had fragmented Rage files after that. With a non encrypted game download it keeps files contiguous assuming the HDD has enough free contiguous space.

The analyze mode of MyDefrag is nice for seeing the state of a drive and files.
 
As far as I can tell, most games do not use GCF, but are NCF. Steams defrag should do nothing for NCF games. The easiest way to tell if your game is GCF, or NCF is by looking in the "steamapp" directory, and seeing what extension is on the file name.
 
I believe they followed that up by saying that the improvement was barely noticeable because the game textures are what they are and a different sort of image upscaling is a very minor change.
 
No, the barely noticeable improvement was about shipping a level with the original textures and with near lossless compression. Carmack apparently thought that more textures got downsized during level optimization.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
No, the barely noticeable improvement was about shipping a level with the original textures and with near lossless compression. Carmack apparently thought that more textures got downsized during level optimization.
Click to expand...

That really isn't clear at all. People decided to assume that, but it obviously isn't correct given the disparity in texture asset size.
 
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