RAGE Suffering on PC; AMD Releases Optimized Driver
PC gamers are outraged over the technical issues surrounding the just-released RAGE shooter.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.
Umm... if the game doesn't run properly on GAMING cards, it's crap.
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.
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 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.
There are a lot of people with issues that truely make the game unplayable (myself included)
I don't remember any problems with Deus Ex?
Umm... if the game doesn't run properly on GAMING cards, it's crap.
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.
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).
From http://www.rage.com/us/extras
Maybe they focused too much on.... ?
> 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.