RAGE Suffering on PC; AMD Releases Optimized Driver
id Software's first original IP since the launch of Quake back in 1996, RAGE, officially hit stores shelves as of early Tuesday morning/ late Monday night at the stroke of midnight. John Carmack (CTO), Tim Willits (Creative Director), Matt Hooper (Design Director) and many other key members of the RAGE team even camped out at the Gamestop store in Mesquite, TX to sign the game boxes of numerous giddy fans.
But not even 12 hours later, PC gamers are already lashing out (Steam, NeoGAF), calling RAGE a "broken mess." The biggest complaints describe intense screen-tearing, poor texture loading and numerous other glitches. Most of the problems reportedly revolve around AMD customers, but Nvidia patrons are also having their fair share of issues as well. Even Alec Meer from Rock, Paper, Shotgun says that he's seeing quite a few technical problems on his PC to the point where he isn't even sure he can keep playing.
"Sounds like I’m not alone either," he writes. "The ‘megatextures’ streaming texture system is horribly noticeable. If I spin to camera to look 90 or 180 or more degrees in the other direction, for a split second half the world is blurry and featureless, before the impressively detailed textures pop into sight. It’s really, really distracting, I must say."
Naturally the first thing out of id Software's mouth early Tuesday morning was to make sure the GPU drivers are up to date. Apparently that's the default damage control statement even though most of us have enough intelligence to install the latest drivers when they're released (unless you're on a laptop and installing drivers directly from AMD or Nvidia screws up the entire system, forcing you to wait on the OEM to maybe perhaps someday update their OEM drivers -end rant).
"Everyone, make sure you have latest Nvidia/Ati drivers to play Rage!" John Carmack commands on Twitter.
On the AMD front, the company has actually launched a new, off-schedule graphics driver called the "Catalyst Rage Performance Driver." This release supports Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series cards and is supposed to bring "significant performance gains for single GPU configurations." Unfortunately, this driver is only for Windows 7 users, and there are reports that it hasn't resolved any of the current issues. So far Nvidia hasn't released an optimized driver for its GPUs, but stay tuned.
Despite the issues, the game seems to be doing reasonably well with the critics, receiving an 82 average across all three platforms. "This latest game delivers a huge, exhilarating and gratifying adventure - but a few technical glitches and missing multiplayer modes prevent it from being a perfect pick," reports USA Today.
Seen below is actual footage uploaded to YouTube by a Steam forum member. It shows slow texture loading as he looks left and right. "This is just plain ridiculous," KnaveSkye writes. "I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I can run most games at near maximum settings with a decent frame rate. The fact this game gives you almost no options for graphics makes this kind of performance pretty unacceptable."
Unlike previous games released by id Software, RAGE doesn't offer options to tweak the game's graphics. Instead, the engine reportedly benchmarks and tweaks "invisible settings" to suit the hardware and overall performance. Users can only tweak the resolution, anti-aliasing and gamma.
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Nerd*RAGE*?? Ha!
They should fix these issues as soon as possible to make sure that their engine gets licensed.
Bethesda? There's u're problem
BTW, anyone remember a AAA title that didn't have problems on launch? Even with the distracting textures, at least you can play the game. Ubisoft customers can't say the same thing. Is it unacceptable though? Completely. Nvidia & AMD for certain had early access to the release version of the game. This kinda crap should have been hammered out well ahead of time. Still, when an industry as a whole has no tangible consequences for doing stuff like this, customers get broken games. I wonder how polished it would be if retailers had to take returns on open games?
Ouch
I never liked the Megatexture idea, but I'm also of the opinion that this JC knows more than me on this topic.
I hope he got it right this time.
I'm holding off purchase for now, as I've seen the problem 1sthand.
i honestly dont understand how a couple of blurry textures for a split second can bother people so bad, atleast the game is running for them. also the screen tearing is a non issue, just force the vsync on from catalyst or nvidia's control panel. they really need to give us a benchmark tool imo and let us play with the settings. i dont know if its an opengl thing but lack of multi gpu setups is a shame. and srsly when 3dfx was around couldnt u sli quake 2? i also wonder if carmack purposely held back info from amd and nvidia to try and prove the point that they should be able to write the drivers for there cards instead of having to wait on nvidia and amd
Deus Ex 3, Dragon Age 1 and 2, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Half Life series, Borderlands, Darkstalkers.
There are a lot of people with issues that truely make the game unplayable (myself included)
Intel plus ATI = 0 problem, Great Performance
There goes proper benchmarking......or you could tweak it via .ini files like with Fallout 3 & new vegas........though i havent got the game first hand
BTW, anyone remember a AAA title that didn't have problems on launch? Even with the distracting textures, at least you can play the game. Ubisoft customers can't say the same thing. Is it unacceptable though? Completely. Nvidia & AMD for certain had early access to the release version of the game. This kinda crap should have been hammered out well ahead of time. Still, when an industry as a whole has no tangible consequences for doing stuff like this, customers get broken games. I wonder how polished it would be if retailers had to take returns on open games?
I don't remember any problems with Deus Ex?
I bet on SSD setup this would not happen.
All I know is that AMD drivers suck especially if you have CrossfireX which is broken in F1 2011, Fifa 2012 and Dungeon Siege III. I bet Rage runs like ass on it too. They will probably fix it in 6 months and at that point nobody would fucking care.
I see this game as new form of Fall Out. Also Metacritic User score is 4.2, so it was or still at afternoon. So I think I won't buy that game. I want a real pc game with lots of settings for video not a console ported for pc.
Maybe I'm lucky. Most of the complaints I have seen are from people using gaming cards. I have a Nvidia Quadro card on a laptop, and not the high end Quardo to boot. I'm running at the highest settings with the exception of AA. Though the texture pop does occur, even at a quick 180 turn around it maybe is 5-10% of the side I'm turning to. So not a huge amount of pop ins. I haven't really hit bad framerates unless it is expected (3rd person view with vista landscape and effects). Tearing, oddly enough, only occurs on menus. Also when bringing up the Steam menu, the game menu's (not Steam's) bottom half inverts and flickers. Otherwise I have no issue.
crap game
Maybe now Carmack will FINALLY STFU and stop showing off.
Maybe I'm lucky. Most of the complaints I have seen are from people using gaming cards. I have a Nvidia Quadro card on a laptop, and not the high end Quardo to boot. I'm running at the highest settings with the exception of AA. Though the texture pop does occur, even at a quick 180 turn around it maybe is 5-10% of the side I'm turning to. So not a huge amount of pop ins. I haven't really hit bad framerates unless it is expected (3rd person view with vista landscape and effects). Tearing, oddly enough, only occurs on menus. Also when bringing up the Steam menu, the game menu's (not Steam's) bottom half inverts and flickers. Otherwise I have no issue.
Umm... if the game doesn't run properly on GAMING cards, it's crap.
I bet on SSD setup this would not happen.
Interesting idea... it reminds me of how SSD significantly speeds up the rendering in WoW after level transition. You're probably right, but those without an SSD should be able to play the game, nevertheless.
And it's pathetic that there're almost no graphical settings... I love it when the game has a whole bunch of stuff to adjust. No settings = fail.
Overall, I'm glad I didn't get this game and probably never will.
OuchI never liked the Megatexture idea, but I'm also of the opinion that this JC knows more than me on this topic.I hope he got it right this time.I'm holding off purchase for now, as I've seen the problem 1sthand.
im playing the game right now on the recent nvidia beta drivers and havent had one problem except the screen tearing which was easily fixed by forcing it on outside the game. other then that the game has run flawlessly on my gtx 460 at 8x AA and gpu transcoding on
OMG that texture popping is ridiculous.
It can happen once, and then it should be cached. If you turn right, and the right fills in, when you go back to look to the left, what you were just looking at, it should definitely not have texture popping.
I could understand it for any area / scenery you had not yet looked at, but if you were literally just looking at it a second ago, and your character hasn't even moved a single step, OMG!
That's totally unacceptable. They should have just made the game like the original Myst.
This is assuming of course that the user's experience displayed in that youtube video is the 'norm'.
I considered pre-ordering this game for about 5 minutes but figured BF3 and SW:TOR was enough of a gamble. Still considering Skyrim, but I doubt I will ever pre-order again, unless its discounted with free shipping from a place like newegg (my BF3 order, for example).
Forgot to add, I'll wait for the demo.
From http://www.rage.com/us/extras
Maybe they focused too much on.... ?
Hmm... Id delivered something that has technical problems they somehow missed? Why am I not surprised?
No word if it does this on Xbox or PS3?
This is a question for id;
> What was the graphics hardware you've used and the driver version, during buy-off and quality control of the software, before releasing the product to store?
This is also your responsibility to ensure that customer will not ran into problems.
Yay Im not alone
I just got a 6950 for this game and a few other to find out its not working right. This is my first ATI card and I am happy to see they have release a quick fix.
[citation]Maybe they focused too much on.... ?[/citation]
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/ne [...] chid=23760
yes JC even acknowledged that developing for consoles etc was a mistake in june.
developers have gotten very lazy the past decade. now that they are making more because more people are gaming, they care less because they don't need to put in the same quality of work into a game to reap the same reward.
sigh. fuck the system.
"unless you're on a laptop and installing drivers directly from AMD or Nvidia screws up the entire system, forcing you to wait on the OEM to maybe perhaps someday update their OEM drivers -end rant"
YOU ABSOLUTELY NAILED IT!!!!
#1 reason to *NOT* buy a laptop PC for gaming. Good luck getting updated proprietary VGA drivers for it.
developers have gotten very lazy the past decade. now that they are making more because more people are gaming, they care less because they don't need to put in the same quality of work into a game to reap the same reward.sigh. fuck the system.
Please.
There have been buggy games since forever. This is not some recent phenomenon.
That said, how they could have missed this if they did any kind of QC testing at all is mind-boggling. So, you just have to assume they did no QC at all, which is bullcrap.
The game looks interesting, and I might have even given it a purchase, but with such absurd and distracting texture pop-in I'm not interested one bit.
Gamers rage at RAGE...it's as if they were going for that pun..
developers have gotten very lazy the past decade. now that they are making more because more people are gaming, they care less because they don't need to put in the same quality of work into a game to reap the same reward.sigh. fuck the system.
Hopefully the dev "pendulum" will start swinging back toward the PC direction as the XBOX360 and PS3 are obsolete as far as entertainment computing hardware goes.
(I have a PS3 launch 60 that still works and plenty of titles, so don't point the console vs. pc fanboi finger at me).
"unless you're on a laptop and installing drivers directly from AMD or Nvidia screws up the entire system, forcing you to wait on the OEM to maybe perhaps someday update their OEM drivers -end rant"
YOU ABSOLUTELY NAILED IT!!!!
#1 reason to *NOT* buy a laptop PC for gaming. Good luck getting updated proprietary VGA drivers for it.
This is BS. A proper gaming laptop doesn't require you to wait for OEM's drivers. My friend just updated his G73Jh's AMD 5870M drivers a few days ago directly from AMD's website - no problems whatsoever, like usual.
Game Still looks great on my 6850 (1055t..4ghz) with the updated ATI driver. It def still has it's issues graphically...vsync, screen tearing a little bit and slight texture issues occasionally, but it's a HELL OF A GAME!!
It's certainly better than the crap that Crytech took on pc gamers when Crysis 2 was released. THAT was a nightmare for ATI and Nvidia gamers running more than one card and it had a ton of issues.
Bottom line is these devs don't give a shit about pc gamers...FML