By Alec Meer on October 4th, 2011 at 2:16 pm.
Good news! Rage is now on my PC, and I have begun to play it. I am excited to be doing so, based on what I’ve played of the game previously.
Bad news! I’m seeing quite a few technical problems on my PC. To the point where I’m not sure I can keep playing. Sounds like I’m not alone either.
Update: apparently a driver update for Radeons, purported to fix some of the problems, is due later today now here! Investigating now – expect updates shortly. This still doesn’t answer the question of why the game was released in this state, of course – was it not tested on older/current drivers?
Update 2: nope, new driver doesn’t seem to help in any meaningful way. The framerate might be a little better, but the texture/character flickering is awful. Even the map keeps popping out of existence. Gonna have to give up on this game for now, I fear.
Update 3: ATI have fessed up to putting out a borked driver: “All – don’t use the current Rage performance driver – package includes very old OGL files, that’s why you’re seeing corruption etc… New Rage driver with proper OGL component will be posted later today.” And yet they haven’t withdrawn the bad one yet. What fun! Meantime I’ve actually ordered an NVIDIA card so I can get this blinkin’ Wot I Think done without keeling over from a migraine.
Of course, some of these may be down to a specific problem with my PC, although I have not encountered similar issues on any other game. So, you and others may be experiencing different things – if so, please say so below so we can form a picture of what is and isn’t going on here.
Let’s start, though, with something universal to the PC version of the game. There are no graphical options to speak of. Resolution, anti-aliasing, gamma, and that’s it. And this is an id game – y’know, id, masters of technology and all that. There are reports that the game is invisibly benchmarking and tweaking invisible settings to suit, but that’s cold comfort – I want to make my own decisions not have a robot make them for me. And given the game chugs on my graphics card (a Radeon 5850) unless I either drop the res or overclock it, that’s pretty damned annoying. Thank heavens for the AMD Overdrive in my drivers, because that gets the frame rate silky-smooth. Not that this is enough…
First up, 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.
Then I started experiencing weird artifacting – a sort of grid pattern across characters (see below) and visible seams between ground textures. I fiddled with every option in my graphics card settings, but it wouldn’t go away.
On top of that, the mouse cursor moves at about twice the speed in menus as it does in the game itself, which makes it crazy-hard to control when you’re flicking through the inventory or accepting quests. And I say that as someone who likes a high DPI from his rodent.
Then the game’s audio started stuttering, and a few frames began to drop irregularly, whether or not my card was overclocked. And then:
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
I wracked my brains. I remembered I was running the beta version of the ATI drivers, designed for the Battlefield 3 beta. So I uninstalled ‘em and instead installed the latest finished versions. Lo and behold, the weird grid/seam stuff was gone. Hooray!
Except characters and vehicles kept blinking out of existence for a split second, and occasional very brief stretchy-vertical artifacts appear. Again, I tinkered with driver settings, turned overclocking on and off and on and off and then I quit in annoyance and wrote this post.
I am not happy, and raise my eyebrow at any reviews of PC Rage that claim to have had a clear run of it on technical front. I will continue to tinker and to monitor and to read. What about you guys, if you’re either from the US or have used an IP-spoofing tool to defeat the pointlessly staggered UK release? Is it running fine? Hitting any issues? Is my PC haunted, or have id made a bit of a mess of the PC build of their first game in years?
Here’s the aggregated list of known bugs, via Steam forums:
Issues:
No Custom settings for Video Cards
No Console command Read here to enable the console key: http://forums.steampowered.com/forum….php?t=2154191 & via config file here http://forums.steampowered.com/forum…7&postcount=89
No Vsync options – Results in screen tearing – Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game(AMD)
Unable to skip intros??? To disable the intro videos put this “+set com_skipIntroVideo 1″ in the launch options of Rage Via Steam.
Mouse acceleration?
Can’t use Crossfire or SLI..
Bad FoV for PC’s – Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howtoBugs:
Texture Streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Ch6TX-Cbs&hd=1
Missing/blinking textures…
Game crashes when exiting the Arc.
LoD issues(popins dispersing items)
Crashing after intro video
Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
Occasional Artifacts appearing- http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9…0322215294.jpg
Low Frame rates with occasional fps spikes
Loading saves causes videocard drivers to crash…
Game Fails to start with error code #51.
04/10/2011 at 14:21 Choca says:
The game hates Radeons apparently.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 Sepulchrave76 says:
Won’t be getting Rage, then, unless they pull their finger out and patch it up for Radeon users
04/10/2011 at 14:32 woodsey says:
As someone who knows absolutely nothing on the subject, I feel perfectly qualified to accusingly ask:
How can nVidia’s chipsets and ATI’s be THAT much different?
04/10/2011 at 14:39 Askeladd says:
If I remember right then Id’s games always ran worse on ATI/AMD card then Nvidia cards.
I suspect partiality.
04/10/2011 at 14:46 Lifebleeder says:
I have a GTX 580, and while I thankfully haven’t had as many problems as AMD users. The screen tearing/texture popping got so bad, I had to stop playing the game.
04/10/2011 at 15:02 Vagrant says:
2011 has been a bad year for AMD’s video cards; their driver team has seriously dropped the ball. With so many performance issues with major releases this year, I can’t imagine me getting another Radeon.
04/10/2011 at 15:10 DrGonzo says:
Blaming these issues on AMD is ridiculous. Their game doesn’t work.
04/10/2011 at 15:14 Kal says:
The RAGE-specific driver makes it worse, btw. It adds a flickering problem that isn’t present in the other drivers.
04/10/2011 at 15:14 Ricc says:
@woodsey:
I don’t know about the hardware itself, but the graphics drivers definitely are very different between ATI and nVidia. Each of them have come to an independent solution of how to actually render graphics. There might be common knowledge between the two, but both pieces of software have their own quirks and oddities, I imagine.
04/10/2011 at 15:15 Optimaximal says:
Hasn’t AMD/ATI always been bad for OpenGL?
04/10/2011 at 15:49 sneetch says:
@Vagrant
2011 has been a bad year for AMD’s video cards; their driver team has seriously dropped the ball. With so many performance issues with major releases this year, I can’t imagine me getting another Radeon.
Yeah, I suspect it’s not the AMD team’s fault that these dev companies either don’t test on AMD cards or do test on AMD cards and decide not to fix the performance issues they find on them.
Time and again we see this: why don’t they develop for the drivers that people have rather than some mythical super driver that we have to wait 3 months for.
04/10/2011 at 15:56 Sweetz says:
Rage uses OpenGL and ATI’s OpenGL support has been historically poor while nVidia’s has not.
The game is running without notable issues on my GTX 570. Assuming the game isn’t using vendor specific rendering paths, circa 2000 style, how can you blame the game when nVidia cards seem to be handling the same rendering instructions just fine?
I will say, that even without streaming problems, several textures in the game are simply embarrassingly low-res. The landscape and character textures are fine, but lots of incidental “decoration” objects – soda machines, boxes, paintings on walls, various bits and bobs – are all noticeably low res compared to any average UE3 game.
04/10/2011 at 16:05 sneetch says:
@Sweetz says:
The game is running without notable issues on my GTX 570. Assuming the game isn’t using vendor specific rendering paths, circa 2000 style, how can you blame the game when nVidia cards seem to be handling the same rendering instructions just fine?
Your card and PC may be handling it just fine but from looking at the Steam forums not all nVidia users are that lucky.
04/10/2011 at 16:05 Screamer says:
So if the old drivers don’t work, and the new drivers don’t work….. what did they test on? O_o
“Its done when it’s done” hahahahah
04/10/2011 at 16:07 MidoriChaos says:
(@Sweetz) I think I read id saying at some point that a patch with higher resolution textures will be released for PC after release date, but they didn’t want to hold the release to keep it in line with consoles.
04/10/2011 at 16:48 voidburn says:
The game hates PC, quoting from various forums around
Here is the comparison and new system requirements:
Minimum:
Xbox or PS3
Recommended:
Xbox or PS3
Visual benchmark
04/10/2011 at 17:10 Simon Hawthorne says:
@sneech
“Time and again we see this: why don’t they develop for the drivers that people have rather than some mythical super driver that we have to wait 3 months for.”
Exactly THIS…
What drivers were they testing on? This game ran at shows, it’s run for bug testing, etc – they must have had some kind of drivers that WORKED, surely?!
04/10/2011 at 17:53 psyk says:
Just repost this from the last page of comments
http://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator
04/10/2011 at 18:12 Azhrarn says:
@Woodsey
“How can nVidia’s chipsets and ATI’s be THAT much different?”
The difference is in how nVidia and AMD go about designing their rendering cores (you know, those increasingly large numbers of “cores” that both parties love to put on the box), nVidia’s cores are relatively strait forward and offer a lot of brawn on the rendering side with post-processing done mostly afterwards by other cores. Their cards are better at pushing polygons around than anyone else.
AMDs cores are a lot more complicated, potentially much more flexible but they’re also a lot harder to use as a result of this.
They have lots of parallel processing potential, where as nVidia’s offering is much more strait forward to code for and relies more on the brute strength of the GPU rather than all the clever features hidden in the hardware.
Given the time constraints on many development cycles these days, going for the strait forward brawn based rendering option is quite logical. AMDs offering can potentially do much more with less power, but would cost a lot more development time as it’s more difficult to code for.
It’s also why nVidia has fairly consistently held the crown for “most powerful single GPU” over the years, their entire rendering method relies much more on the pure calculating power of the processor on board, it makes sense to build monstrous calculating beasts because of that.
04/10/2011 at 18:15 Jibb Smart says:
It’s tough being a developer. You have an nVidia card, because you know better than to have an AMD card. But you should develop with an AMD card, because so many people don’t know better than to have an AMD card.
Of course, this is all on id. For sure. But if the issue was going to be worse under one brand, it was always going to be AMD.
04/10/2011 at 18:36 Dhatz says:
that fucking shit with texture tiling happened to quite mane people on Brink, i guess it’s avoiding nvidia or just too many people have AMD, like me.
04/10/2011 at 19:14 Baines says:
@Simon Hawthorne
It works on whatever high end machine they coded/tested for, and used for their demos.
Any machine other than what they worked on is a toss-up.
One of the Steam posters mentioned trying it on two almost identical PCs. (Main/only difference was that one had a single stronger graphics card while the other had two slightly weaker cards in tandem. Cards were same brand, just different models.) On one, it worked fine. On the other, it didn’t.
To add to the mix, what some people see as problems, others see as acceptable (like texture pop-in when turning.) And some may be running fine, but near the razor’s edge of failure. Someone mentioned Rage ran with no problems, but if they turned on fraps to record it (to upload proof), then texture pop-in occurred.
EDIT: I’m not exactly happy with nvidia at the moment, either. I haven’t been able to update the drivers to my nvidia card for nearly a year, it fails on the install and I’ve yet to find a fix. This is apparently not an unknown issue. Worse, if you are really unlucky, it is apparently possible to break Safe Mode with a failed nvidia driver install.
04/10/2011 at 19:41 Bremze says:
While historically Nvidia cards have been better at OpenGL, currently AMD cards actually surpass Nvidia in OpenGL performance. And it looks like Nvidia has its fair share of problems too.
04/10/2011 at 20:15 Archonsod says:
“Time and again we see this: why don’t they develop for the drivers that people have rather than some mythical super driver that we have to wait 3 months for.”
Because the drivers people actually have and the drivers the driver developers claim they have are often two entirely different things, and developers aren’t generally known for their psychic mindreading powers.
04/10/2011 at 22:22 aldo_14 says:
Have you tried updating the VBIOS? I don’t know if it’s what you’re having, but my attempts to update my 9800 drivers would result in a black, blank screen on startup until I did that.
04/10/2011 at 23:40 evilbobthebob says:
You know what’s funniest about this? The Xbox graphics chip was designed by ATi, called the Xenos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_%28graphics_chip%29
05/10/2011 at 00:04 malkav11 says:
One of the reasons I have consistently purchased nVidia cards despite ATI cards intermittently having better raw performance is that when technical issues crop up related to a particular vendor’s videocards and/or drivers, it’s probably 8/10 or 9/10 ATI. And I’d much rather not have technical issues than have a few extra fps.
04/10/2011 at 14:22 karucifer says:
Most of the Rage performance issues are to be fixed in an imminent driver release (for both single and CF setups):
http://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator/status/120968368210718720
Re this:
This still doesn’t answer the question of why the game was released in this state, of course – was it not tested on older/current drivers?
Alec – Carmack has made his career from pioneering new techniques with the likes of ATI and Nvidia always on the back foot, it not working on existing drivers is pretty much a given where a new ID engine is concerned.
04/10/2011 at 16:31 Ultra-Humanite says:
Crashing to desktop is apparently the wave of the future.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 Shrewsbury says:
And crash.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 max pain says:
I have no fear. Americans are beta-testing the game for me.
04/10/2011 at 14:39 Meat Circus says:
Is it possible to patch in a story?
04/10/2011 at 16:00 Azdeus says:
Bugs can be fixed, but shitty design is forever…
04/10/2011 at 14:23 Unaco says:
Why do game journalists keep mistaking iD tech demos for games?
04/10/2011 at 14:31 abigbat says:
Witty.
The game looks superb, and by most accounts is an extremely solid experience. There’s a patch being released to fix Radeon issues too.
04/10/2011 at 14:32 Cerzi says:
why do gamers keep mistaking iD for id?
04/10/2011 at 14:35 PoulWrist says:
Dunno, because they released 2 games that were the epitome of a good first person shooter and 3 games that were the litmus test for what a good multiplayer game was supposed to be, maybe? I don’t know. Probably because they’re the Blizzard of FPS.
04/10/2011 at 14:37 Capt. Eduardo del Mango says:
The issues mentioned here are actually more applicable to it being a shitty tech demo than to it being a shitty game.
04/10/2011 at 14:43 Unaco says:
Paraphrasing a little here, but from what I’ve heard it’s “Borderlands with the fun stripped out, Fallout 3 without any choices, consequences, or characters.” The game looks pretty, but it’s mechanically bankrupt, bland, linear, weak, tedious and has no apparent story. But it does look good!
04/10/2011 at 14:51 Matt says:
Congratulations, you can quote Ars Technica “reviews.”
04/10/2011 at 14:51 PoulWrist says:
Oh OK. I heard something different. But then, Borderlands was almost empty of fun, Fallout 3 had no choices, and both games had weak gunplay, retarded AI, and no difficulty. So! According to these reviews I read on Rage, it’s like someone took the ideas of Fallout 3 and Borderlands and made a good game with them :D I am so looking forward to Amazon shipping my copy ^^
04/10/2011 at 15:03 The Colonel says:
Second PoulWrist. Borderlands and FO3 were both shit.
04/10/2011 at 15:08 2late2die says:
Not sure really. After Quake they pretty much stopped making games and have concentrated exclusively on tech demos. With all that texture popping though it seems that they’re slipping in that department as well.
04/10/2011 at 15:09 briktal says:
From what I’ve heard, the shooting people with weapons part is great and when all the pretty stuff is working the game looks great, but there are some technical problems and the parts where you aren’t shooting people are kinda lame. The big debate I’m seeing in comments is how big a deal that last point is.
04/10/2011 at 17:08 nimzy says:
Yeah, Rage is definitely a tech demo. Check out the Ars Technica review if you have any doubts about that one.
So Rage on PC is a console port? That’s a first for these guys. The “mouse acceleration in menus doubling or tripling” thing is a dead giveaway, as is the texture pop-in (optimization fail) and lack of visual settings. Let me guess, mouse smoothing is turned on by default and there isn’t an option to turn that off either?
04/10/2011 at 17:31 mmorpg games says:
spot on!
04/10/2011 at 18:17 Zenicetus says:
I don’t have a dog in this fight because I’ll probably pass on Rage anyway, but I have to vent at that kind of mouse behavior. It’s infuriating, and increasingly it’s showing up in games I otherwise enjoy, like Witcher 2. The mouse in that game still feels completely different between the main game engine and the menu screens. Why can’t the mouse in a “PC” game work like the mouse on my Windows desktop? Really, is that too much to ask? It’s the year 2011 and game developers don’t know how to directly access the mouse driver?
04/10/2011 at 19:44 briktal says:
Tech demo for who?
04/10/2011 at 22:16 Thants says:
Thank you, Zenicetus. Note to all developers: I want the mouse in the game is behave exactly the same as it does out of the game. I can’t believe that’s such a difficult thing to accomplish.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 standardman says:
On the plus side, the pointlessly staggered uk release will allow people to cancel their preorders.
04/10/2011 at 14:36 Dreamhacker says:
Another great and fiendishly clever reason for supporting the RPS No Oceans Initiative.
04/10/2011 at 15:43 LTK says:
Not if you’re id.
04/10/2011 at 17:02 Milky1985 says:
““Another great and fiendishly clever reason for supporting the RPS No Oceans Initiative.”
Or the exact opposite of that.”
For a publisher (and they are the ones that will make this decision) this is a perfect reason.
04/10/2011 at 14:24 Jockie says:
On the verge of cancelling my pre-order. I want to like this and I want ID to not make a crappy pc port that alienates their hardcore fanbase, but they need to get a patch out sharpish and work with ATI to get some new drivers out.
On the other hand, the benefit of the staggered release dates has become apparant as others have suggested (as with Dead Island), the US gets to beta test for us!
07/10/2011 at 11:48 yukshee says:
Phew! Just my pre-order refund confirmation from Steam :) I’ll hang on to the 22gb pre-install and watch the skies for patches and fixes before handing over my cash.
Way to go beta testing it on your loyal US gaming fans Beth & iD ;)
04/10/2011 at 14:26 donmcarthur says:
It is kinda disappointing that Rage has these technical issue out of the gate. I know id was doing some new graphics tech that required nVidida and AMD to add new features into their drivers. I just wish they had rolled in these new features into their drivers months ago and not in a Zero day driver patch.
The game will be here shortly, it’s on the truck for delivery, so I too will be able to be part of this negative hullabaloo! I’ve got a HD 5850 too so I’m not to optimistic, that I won’t run into problems.
04/10/2011 at 15:28 iniudan says:
Got a 5670 here and it ran has smooth has Barry White voice, except someone was hitting him while he was singing, so odd sound would come out while been smooth.
Basically in the time I played there seem to be a good game under the technical issue (flickering and texture popping), that are mostly likely due to Id using OpenGL, thus lot of driver issue since OpenGL driver tend to be lacking update these day for so few AAA dev push the boundary of it.
04/10/2011 at 14:29 abigbat says:
This is seriously worrying, especially since Rage was one of the games I went and upgraded my rig for. More than anything the lack of video options irritates me, I hate not being able to tinker – of course once people become familiar with the config files that’ll hopefully become less of an issue (may go explore the folders now and see what’s about).
Is there a way to confuse the IP to activate the Steam version without risking your account (I have around 200 games on there so any risk is too high, but if it can be done relatively safely that could be tempting).
04/10/2011 at 14:31 Daryl says:
A major developer shitting the bed with a crappy console port to PC? The hell you say! I knew a looooooooong time ago I wasn’t going to waste my money on this crap.
04/10/2011 at 14:35 Askeladd says:
I knew looong ago that RAGE was one of the games I’d eventually pick up on a steam sale.
04/10/2011 at 15:15 Tei says:
Rage（╯°□°）╯︵ ɔd ǝɥʇ
04/10/2011 at 14:32 sbs says:
Noooooooooo!
04/10/2011 at 14:34 Teddy Leach says:
This is no time to reference Star Wars.
04/10/2011 at 14:41 DiamondDog says:
Who said anything about Star Wars?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGfWrJR5Ck
04/10/2011 at 14:55 The Colonel says:
Mace Windu, my wise mentor! What have I done!?
I will kill all the children my master.
04/10/2011 at 14:33 Deadpool46 says:
Rich over at PC Gamer didn’t have any issues to speak of but he was playing at a review event.
Reading lots of mixed reports but there’s something possibly going awry with the game’s auto-settings. Check out the post by Nostalgia~4ever on NeoGAF… http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=446341&page=72
Looks like the game does some kind of benchmark, then decides on the graphical settings. You can see in the post that the game thought the PC had zero GPU memory. Curious.
04/10/2011 at 14:33 GoodPatton says:
On my NVidia GTX 260 the game runs smoothly however texture loading still occurs with quick movements. I’ve noticed this happens less on lowered resolutions but then I suppose that should be expected. I’ve also noticed audio sync issues with most dialog and have had a few audio bits end abruptly.
Also noticed some poor audio when using vehicles, mostly with the acceleration triggering.
Haven’t had any missing textures or crashes but I have only played for about 50 minutes so who knows.
Looking forward to jumping in for some more shortly regardless!
Heres hoping for a swift resolution to these issues!
P.S. Doom bobble head made me smile!
04/10/2011 at 14:34 SpaceAkers says:
How many games release with graphics problems for a certain few users? All of them?
Nearly a non-story here, except the ludicrousness about the lack of graphic options. I’m getting this thing through Gamefly on a console, so I don’t really care but that’s pretty awful!
Kinda wack that iD’s new game is a lame console port, but then again that company hasn’t made a good game since Q3A, unless this guy turns out to be sweet.
04/10/2011 at 21:19 Droopy The Dog says:
How many times must an indefinite term like “a few” be used to tar all situations with the same brush?
That could mean a couple of dozen people, or 10% of the player base. One deserves reporting, the other not so much.
04/10/2011 at 14:35 Sfitz says:
The dotted lines on the textures make that lady look she’s just been divided up for the best cuts of delicious meat.
04/10/2011 at 14:36 Hoaxfish says:
delicious bare midriff
04/10/2011 at 14:50 Jarenth says:
Damnit, you beat me to it! I should’ve made that joke as soon as I saw the picture, but nooo, I had to laugh at Alec’s misfortune some more.
04/10/2011 at 18:53 Muzman says:
My money was on poorly placed liposuction scars.
04/10/2011 at 19:05 Sleepymatt says:
Perhaps she is really a folded origami model?
04/10/2011 at 14:36 CaspianRoach says:
Borderlands had similar texture streaming system but it didn’t re-load textures it just loaded. Take notes, id!
04/10/2011 at 14:57 simoroth says:
Borderlands uses traditional texture mapping. This game uses Megatexturing, its very, very different.
The core issue is its very memory intensive, but bandwidth for streaming from Ram to main memory hasn’t caught up, and since you cant prebuffer several gig of texture maps in the GPU memory, the game is completely dependant on the speed of your PCI bus.
04/10/2011 at 14:36 Hoaxfish says:
Sounds like an existential dilema
04/10/2011 at 21:23 Droopy The Dog says:
Click wherever you want to restart again in apathy mode, or not, whatever.
04/10/2011 at 14:36 Christian says:
According to the Giant Bomb Quicklook, the tearing and missing textures while spinning around are the weak-point of the engine. They quoted someone from id (John Carmack even?) saying that you could easily break the engine that way if you wanted to and there’s no way they’re going to fix it.
Also, regarding gameplay, both Destructoid and Ars Technica have nice reviews up..also the Quick Look was an eye opener for me. Sure glad I didn’t pre-order this one..
[edit]
Hmm, strange though. According to the reviews (for xbox), it doesn’t have a checkpoint system for savegames, only manual saving. So I was thinking maybe they had the pc as lead-platform..but the missing options seem to tell another story here.
04/10/2011 at 14:47 alundra says:
The game is just a huge mess, Ars’ review is for the 360 version of the game, which was the rumored (or real?) target platform, the impression is that the game is just another bland demo of ID latest engine, just without the technical problems on PC (and PS3 I’ve read).
I almost feel sorry for the mounds of legion of doom followers that wasted their money on pre order.
04/10/2011 at 14:48 GoodPatton says:
If I remember correctly Carmack described the easiest way to break the engine would be on 360 by leaving an area then returning to the area by walking backwards and then turning around as fast as possible.
I had hoped texture loading would be a little less obvious on PC!
04/10/2011 at 14:57 TillEulenspiegel says:
What a piece of junk. If that’s true…well, it’s quite hard to believe.
Did they actually design it so that turning up your mouse sensitivity breaks the graphics? There’s not enough RAM to store the necessary textures for your immediate surroundings?
It screams “we designed this engine based on console limitations.”
04/10/2011 at 15:03 alundra says:
ah well, I couldn’t know for sure, everyone but the usual pre-paid-reviews sites like IGN or EGM tell horror stories about the game, the impression I’ve got is that the x360 version of the game is the less bugged one, don’t quote me on that though.
the videos I’ve seen in youtube look totally pathetic, and I’m not sure where the logic lies in waiting for a driver update for the greens or the reds, is a driver update going to add decent options and/or patch the game to a non beta stage???
04/10/2011 at 15:47 Christian says:
I’ve found the mention, it’s in their review of the xbox-version at about 30 minutes in where they qoute him from QuakeCon:
http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-rage/17-4996/
And it seems this is really engine-related.
But apart from that..it just seems a bit boring to play (but the character’s animations when they are talking and not just standing around sure look nice)..
04/10/2011 at 14:37 Halcyon says:
I am experiencing all of the same issues listed above, fwiw. I don’t want to be just another whining internet citizen, but I will say this: This is the last game that I purchase based solely on the assumption that ID makes quality PC games.
04/10/2011 at 14:38 Dreamhacker says:
I don’t get it, I thought id were widely recognized as masters of graphics programming?
04/10/2011 at 14:41 Hoaxfish says:
yea, that’s a little disconcerting… maybe they’s masters of ipad programming now, and their PC porting is terrible
04/10/2011 at 15:00 The Colonel says:
To be fair, presumably the purpose of the mega-texture streaming business was to make a console game look much much better than it could otherwise have looked. PC games can look that good without clever programming tricks, but they were hardly going to write one set of code for the console and another for the PC release.
04/10/2011 at 15:26 TillEulenspiegel says:
You don’t need separate branches of code. You need one bit of code that detects available RAM and scales the cache size accordingly. Basic, basic stuff.
04/10/2011 at 15:49 The Colonel says:
I’d be surprised if Carmack missed “basic, basic stuff”. Knowing nothing about how the MegaTexturing works, I have no idea why it doesn’t just stuff all the textures it’s already loaded around you into the RAM. Presumably it doesn’t do that for a reason.
04/10/2011 at 16:08 rocketman71 says:
“WERE” being the key word in that sentence.
04/10/2011 at 16:15 carn1x says:
I thought one of the major reasons for Megatexture was to provide artists with unlimited freedom to style any part of the landscape without repercussions? Traditional games overlay multiple textures on top of each other, which has performance drawbacks if unchecked. I’m fairly sure ET:QW used Megatexture as well, although I can imagine Rage’s implementation has been drastically amped up, perhaps too far?
04/10/2011 at 16:17 TillEulenspiegel says:
Caching is conceptually identical on all levels of hardware and software. If you can’t implement it properly, you’ve seriously fucked up.
Besides, when your results are shit, nobody cares about your excuses. If you can’t make it work properly, don’t release it.
04/10/2011 at 16:35 Srethron says:
Regarding the blurriness while the texture loads: If I understand Carmack’s Quakecon 2011 Keynote correctly, any given render the player sees is a 4096×4096 texture getting assembled Minecraft style from something ridiculous like ~20TB of state of the art compressed texture data and then streamed in, hence his remarks about the blurriness being at its worst if one backs into an area and then suddenly flips one’s view 180 degrees. I don’t know how long it takes to stream something that big at the engine’s 60 FPS, but I’m guessing a while.
The advantage of the megatexture tech seems to have been allowing id’s artists to create assets in (1) an efficient pipeline, (2) where they didn’t have to worry about resource constraints and (3) could thus go nuts. Apparently from “is it a playable experience?”, this fails? =/
04/10/2011 at 14:40 ehukai says:
I’m running a GeForce 560 Ti and haven’t had any problem other than screen tearing. I wonder if all of this is Radeon related. If so, then I wonder what that says about id’s testing environment.
04/10/2011 at 14:42 Teddy Leach says:
Dan Hagar could do nothing but stare onwards in horror as the disembodied hand floated nearby and congratulated him on his choice of shades.
04/10/2011 at 14:43 G915 says:
Suddenly, I’m not so bummed that I couldn’t preorder this game in EU.
04/10/2011 at 14:44 Ramshambo says:
“No Custom settings for Video Cards”
Sad, very very sad right now.
04/10/2011 at 14:44 DeanLearner says:
This whole updating drivers each time a game is released is getting ridiculous. It seems like a certain lack of respect is granted to PC gamers.
04/10/2011 at 14:45 Pasperix says:
I am experiencing sadness as well as rage; this game delivers more than it promises in that respect. Starting to wonder if I should get the console version instead…
04/10/2011 at 14:53 Teddy Leach says:
You can’t experience Sadness yet. That’s the sequel.
04/10/2011 at 15:42 RaytraceRat says:
nowadays it will be a DLC
04/10/2011 at 15:52 The Colonel says:
You can already purchase three Sadness animations for your character’s face (you can’t see it but NPCs in the game will be impressed by your emotional range): Crying, Frowning and Just Kinda Sad Looking. These are available from the idStore for £1.99 each. You can buy a pack containing all animations, hats, clothes colours and patterns for £31.99.
04/10/2011 at 14:48 The Sombrero Kid says:
PC Gamer seem to have played it at id HQ and by the sounds of it they were there with all other PC Journos, I’m fairly certain id have pulled a bait & switch here.
04/10/2011 at 15:11 TillEulenspiegel says:
Did PC Gamer UK actually write a review based solely on that experience? Wow. That’s extremely disappointing.
04/10/2011 at 15:25 Choca says:
And that’s why you never review a game in a controlled environment at the publisher’s place.
04/10/2011 at 16:47 The Sombrero Kid says:
To be fair to them the only reason we know that’s how ALL PC Journo’s reviews were written is because PC Gamer UK done the Due Dilligence and admitted it, as far as i can tell, they’re the only ones who did.
04/10/2011 at 16:58 Ed123 says:
Didn’t PC Gamer used to harp on about how they would NEVER do anything like that? They had a little blurb at the start of the review section iirc.
04/10/2011 at 20:46 Dreamhacker says:
Yeah, “never review beta code”. So much for honest game journalism.
04/10/2011 at 22:31 aldo_14 says:
I’m pretty sure they were reviewing beta code at least as far back as 2004; I remember the Battlefield Vietnam review explicitly mentioned a B-52 vehicle that was apparently taken out in the beta (pissed me off royally, along with the god-awful game performance).
Pretty much why I stopped buying the magazine.
04/10/2011 at 14:51 killmachine says:
brink also has virtual textures and also had massive problems with ati/amd cards at launch. there was the gridding issue as well, but that had been fixed shortly after release.
the bad ati/amd performance still persists though. hoping id can sort that out.. gonna wait and see. sorry for the pre order folks, or am i? no, actually i’m not. i learned that apparently it’s impossible to release a game without major bugs and don’t pre order anthing anymore.
04/10/2011 at 15:09 Jesse L says:
And isn’t that the truth? I don’t preorder PC games for the same reason. Red Orchestra 2 ALMOST almost almost had my money, but somehow I managed to resist pre-ordering and now I’m so glad I did. Is anyone keeping track of the percentage of mainstream PC games that launch broken for a significant portion of the player base? Is it more or less than 50%?
Fingers crossed for Skyrim; it’s the only day-one buy for me this year. That and Dark Souls for Xbox which arrives today (!!!!!), can’t wait can’t wait can’t wait…
04/10/2011 at 15:15 The Colonel says:
You made an error not buying RO2 on release. I started playing a week after release and everyone is already almost infinitely better than me! :(
04/10/2011 at 17:21 vodkarn says:
“Fingers crossed for Skyrim; i”
Oh you poor poor man.
04/10/2011 at 21:07 jonfitt says:
Fingers crossed for Skyrim? Fingers crossed for a working Bethesda game on a new engine?
Thanks for making me spit out my tea!
04/10/2011 at 14:55 clownst0pper says:
Buying an ATI HD5870 is the worst thing I’ve ever done to my PC. It’s just a constant driver and frame rate battle. Brink runs like shit as well despite my spec being way way over so no doubt RAGE
will run bollocks too.
Cannot wait to go back to Nvidia.
04/10/2011 at 15:34 evilbobthebob says:
Of course it’s AMD’s fault that the game doesn’t run correctly on their graphics cards. It couldn’t possibly be lazy testing on the part of developers who for some reason can’t acknowledge the only other major player in the dedicated graphics market because of the cash thrown at them by Nvidia.
04/10/2011 at 16:01 Starky says:
Yet my 5770 runs everything like a dream at 1080p (maybe not quite fully MAXED, but usually on high with a bit of AA).
I suppose it is just luck of the specific system setup.
04/10/2011 at 16:22 Chorltonwheelie says:
I’ve always had ATI cards. I recently jumped ship to GTX560ti and it’s a whole new world. It’s coped splendidly with everything I’ve thrown at it (Metro 2033, RO2, BF3 beta all spot on). And this is on an old 6600@3.1!
It’s not good for gamer’s in the long run but the difference is huge. This just confounds it.
04/10/2011 at 19:23 Starky says:
I tend to switch every card update – NV MX440 > ATI 9550 > NV 6800 (vanillia AGP) > ATI x1950 pro > NV 8800GT (g92) > ATI 5770
I’m thinking about replacing it with a 560 Ti also actually, as soon as prices for them drop below £150.
04/10/2011 at 20:01 Vandelay says:
Have a 6950 at the moment and not had a single issue with it. Everything, excluding games with “experimental” DirectX 11 modes (e.g Metro 2033 and Crysis 2), has worked pretty much perfectly on max settings at my native resolution of 1680×1050. Before this card I had a 4850, which also gave brilliant performance and reportedly still does to this day.
I have absolutely no idea what anyone here is taking about regarding bad Ati cards and the poor performance this year. Off the top of my head, I can only think of this and Brink (worked fine for me,) that have had poor performance on Ati, both of which sound like they have numerous faults on cards from both manufacturers.
04/10/2011 at 14:57 thesmileman says:
That supposed updated does nothing for the random artifact flashing which is all over the entire screen. Right now the game is simply unplayable on most ATI graphics cards. Just look at the Steam forum.
04/10/2011 at 15:00 db1331 says:
Well that’s what you get for buying the PC version. Didn’t you see the TV spot where Rage was touted as the “BEST CONSOLE GAME”? Who knows how good the PC version is. To be fair to id though, they never made any claims as to the quality of the PC version.
04/10/2011 at 15:01 staberas says:
… and thats what happens when you develop games with consoles in mind.
04/10/2011 at 15:01 Unaco says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I91AG2BhcI
That’s a video of the MegaTexture Streaming system being… well… being a bit sh*t really.
04/10/2011 at 15:07 The Colonel says:
Ok I take back my previous defence of the MegaTextures. That’s not acceptable for PC at all. Why can’t it hold textures in the RAM?
04/10/2011 at 15:18 Rasgueado says:
Wow… well now I understand why some people would be upset by that pop in. It doesn’t look anything like that for me.
04/10/2011 at 15:19 db1331 says:
If you guys want a laugh, watch that youtube link, then read this article where someone from id stated that developing for consoles instead of PC actually gives more depth than it takes away:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/20/id-software-ceo-consoles-give-more-depth-than-they-take-away/
04/10/2011 at 16:03 Jar says:
Wow, that is quite horrific and I can understand the vitriol.
I can say that I was worried that my GeForce 570 on a 2560×1600 display would end up being starved of video memory and cause graphic anomalies, and after hearing reports of texture pop-in I kept trying to do the spin-and-see and just did not see anything of the sort.
I figured that people were being over-sensitive, but that video is unacceptable.
I would recommend that anybody interested in the tech and Carmack’s thoughts on the development cycles for the console vs. the PC listen to his keynote at quakecon this year. Hint: it is absolutely not a console “port”, though I can see where people get that idea after seeing that video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28
He does not pull any punches on his thoughts and frustrations with the state of display drivers, and if you have ever had to use the various tweak panels for doing things like forcing AA, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that a lot of functions that I always assumed to be handled “behind the scenes” are in reality just profile definitions custom built for the various game engines.
It seems that both nvidia and ATI/AMD are guilty of really just hacking support in by forcing certain behavior if certain conditions are met (ie. if the executable is named whatever.exe). It isn’t exactly graceful. And when new “drivers” are released with a big game, it often times is just all of the various tweaks for that particular game pre-defined to mask the shortcomings of the driver, the API, the game engine, or a combination of the 3.
It seems to me that RAGE, like all of id’s games, was written with the audacious expectation that the display drivers have their collective shit together. Which is a pretty foolish position to take, but really what can you do?
I imagine that in the next couple of days we will see drivers released with more cooperative pre-set profiles in place to better deal with the game.
04/10/2011 at 16:13 rocketman71 says:
@db1331 That’s not someone, that’s hollowh… I mean, Hollenshead, and his credibility is as low as fourzerotwo’s.
Ignore whatever they say. Them, Pachter and CliffyB form the poker of inanity of the gaming industry.
And Molyneux is the Joker.
04/10/2011 at 21:03 LintMan says:
Crap! The guy who made that video has the same video card as the one I just bought! And my Rage pre-order just arrived from Amazon. :-(
04/10/2011 at 15:05 Rasgueado says:
I’m going to be in the minority on this one, but the GPU Transcoding option doesn’t strike me as either “shoddy” or “horrific.” I like to be able to individually set settings as much as the next guy (I’ll admit having to force vsync on in my driver control panel was irritating as the tearing was atrocious) but if the game can figure out what settings your computer can handle automatically what’s so bad about that? The issue in this case is that it doesn’t seem to be able to do that… but if it *did* work right, would that be awful?
Otherwise the game for me seems to work fine. The pop is pretty minimal, and I’ve had no issues otherwise to this point with the exception of having to force Vsync on with my drivers to stop the constant tearing.
04/10/2011 at 15:11 The Colonel says:
Well it is a problem if the auto-detect is skewed in favour of providing best fidelity. There are millions of possible combinations of components, so not being able to turn off certain features to get back some FPS, or turn off the annoying features (motion blur and most depth of field for me) prevents people running the game as well as it could be running AND how they would like it to look.
It’s not a big deal, it’s just an unnecessary system which takes away some control from the player. Many people will be happy to just be able to start the game without having to go through all the graphics options first, maybe even most. It’s the lack of an Advanced Options tab to tweak.
04/10/2011 at 21:11 LintMan says:
The problem with the game auto-selecting the quality/performance balance for you is that everyone’s preference is different. One person might prefer high quality graphics at 30fps, while another with an identical system might think anything less than 60fps is unplayable. If you aren’t given a choice, someone’s going to be unhappy.
04/10/2011 at 15:06 Thecolours says:
Anything about a driver update for Vista users?
04/10/2011 at 17:24 RaytraceRat says:
yea, but its called Windows 7
04/10/2011 at 21:10 jonfitt says:
Oh snap!
04/10/2011 at 15:07 Tei says:
We need a new imagemacro. One with anakin in the lava with the words “you was the promised oneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”. I trought this was the ultimate iD game, with excellent tecnical qualities, and story, characters, and gameplay. Has nothing. The reviews make the game look like a dull game. No redeaming features other than graphics.
On the PC, the game is a techdemo of why choosing this engine for a game is a bad idea.
John Carmack and the device drivers engineers of ATI can fix the tecnical problem. But the game will still have the stupidity of console menus (press enter to be able to enter the menu to quit, few graphic options, etc) and will still dull.
So this what are a published usefull for. To limit John Carmack time programming. So he don’t dedicate time to remove this horrible bugs from the other 50% of PC users that don’t use nvidia. It don’t seems like us gamers are getting anything positive from id merge into Bethesda, maybe we have lose another dev to the console world :-(
04/10/2011 at 15:10 Hakkesshu says:
The Rage specific driver does precisely jack shit
04/10/2011 at 15:12 Bull0 says:
Almost preordered this a couple of hours ago.
Dodged that bullet.
04/10/2011 at 15:15 LGM says:
The Ars review has me saying “no thanks!”. The whole, “go there, talk to that person, go there, talk to that person, then go here and get that, then go back and talk to that person so he can tell you to drive out into the desert, press a button, then drive back to town” is just insane.
So glad I changed my mind on pre-ordering this a while back.
04/10/2011 at 15:17 Eclipse says:
No Vsync? wtf with you, Id?
04/10/2011 at 15:26 Biggie says:
I believe the lack of v-sync option is because the game will run at 60 v-synced unless the render miss a frame and then it will tear. Well that is how it is supposed to work.
04/10/2011 at 15:19 Tuor says:
Now we know why the game is called “Rage”.
An appropriate title, eh?
04/10/2011 at 15:22 Makariel says:
Being a Radeon-owner I cancelled my pre-order and wait until at least a couple of patches. I am very disappointed :-(
04/10/2011 at 16:18 voidburn says:
Thankfully I was able to cancel the preorder, the PC footage is outrageous. This will land in my steam account at a very later date, possibly when the price also is sized according to the 8 hours or so of game-play. I’m sick of this shit, lately even indie games are capable of delivering game-play > 50 hours.
I gave in initially for the new engine, only for what, discovering that my 5870 + i7 980X and 12 gigs of ram can’t deliver 1080p as well as a fuckin’ xbox 360? Are we frickin’ kiddin’? They might think there’s no limit to the bullshit that pc gamers can withstand, but I hope they’re proved wrong. Thanks god they delayed the release in europe by 2 days, saved me some bucks!
04/10/2011 at 16:57 psyk says:
Most 360 games aren’t 1080p and most of them don’t have any aa so your rage is kinda misplaced
edit – you also never said what your mb was.
04/10/2011 at 17:06 Dervish says:
I like how you say “even” as if it’s harder for indie games to make more content despite their comparatively primitive assets and mechanics.
04/10/2011 at 18:46 voidburn says:
@ Psyk: My mb is a Rampage II Extreme from Asus.
@ Dervish: Fair enough, my point being: I value a game by price/fun/lifespan, I don’t pretend everyone does the same.
04/10/2011 at 15:23 Chris D says:
Generally I am against violence in real life but I think it is the duty of all reasonhable people to uncover the identity of whoever is responsible for that “A problem has caused the program to stop working correctly” message and have them hunted down with dogs.
04/10/2011 at 17:44 Mollusc Infestation says:
What problem? WHAT? Throw me a bone here, MS!
I would like to volunteer my services for your witch hunt.
04/10/2011 at 15:24 King Kong says:
It’s funny to see people say “new id game” as though these are the same people that made Doom 2 and Quake 3
04/10/2011 at 16:18 Bull0 says:
Same lead programmer, same lead artist to name a couple – there are probably more, I can’t find a good source for the RAGE credits
*edit* Lead designer was the level designer on quake 3
They were a pretty small outfit back then and a lot of the heavyweights have stayed on as leads. We aren’t talking about Starbreeze here
04/10/2011 at 15:26 moarage says:
just wondering, isn’t RPS UK based? and isn’t the releasedate of Rage the 7th for it?
04/10/2011 at 15:37 Unaco says:
Yes… But I believe RPS are also ‘Press’, and so get review code early for a number of games.
04/10/2011 at 17:09 sneetch says:
I believe the term “ne’er do wells” fits RPS better than “press”.
04/10/2011 at 17:27 Salt says:
There was some polite complaining in the opening of another story posted today about not being given early access to the game, despite RPS indeed being press.
I imagine Alec was able to download it early by making some servers think he’s in America. Probably by sacrificing a goat over his router.
04/10/2011 at 15:27 Advanced Assault Hippo says:
General vibe seems to be: If you have an Ati card, cancel your preorder.
What a shame.
04/10/2011 at 20:34 alundra says:
The game itself is dull enough to guarantee waiting until it hits the bargain bin, and even purchasing an nvidia card won’t fix that.
04/10/2011 at 15:28 ResonanceCascade says:
Wow, didn’t expect this. Doom 3 was a system hog when it was released, but it certainly wasn’t buggy. In fact, it was probably the least buggy AAA game I’ve played in the last 10 years at launch. The fact that Rage is so broken for so many people is a huge shame. Didn’t id notice that it’s OK to make a proper PC game again?
04/10/2011 at 16:33 Tuor says:
They’re not an independent company anymore. They were bought up by ZeniMax Media. So, the answer is, “No, they didn’t.” Too bad, but it appears iD has gone to the Dark Side.
04/10/2011 at 16:36 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
Who can truly be said to be independent?
04/10/2011 at 18:06 ResonanceCascade says:
I KNOW they’re owned by Bethesdamax. That’s not exactly top secret information. :P
Anyway, I forgot about a big shpiel Carmack went on a few months ago implying that they kinda botched the PC development, and next time it will be the lead platform again. Someone posted a transcript at the Bethesda boards, it’s worth a read. So maybe next time if we’re lucky.
05/10/2011 at 04:40 wazups2x says:
“Who can truly be said to be independent?”
Valve.
04/10/2011 at 15:35 Pobblepop says:
This is interesting as just about every interview I’ve seen with Carmack over the last year he went on and on about making sure it was going to run smoothly at 60fps on whatever hardware it was installed on. Seems like so much guff and bruhaha now.
04/10/2011 at 15:39 wodin says:
Oh bugger…it sounds wanked…no graphic options? Is that a bug or WAD?
Those mega textures sound mega shit…
Also 20 gig download? Lots of game but….oh fuck em.
04/10/2011 at 15:39 kit89 says:
It should be pointed out that Rage’s graphics use the OpenGL library. Nvidia have always been well known to support both OpenGL and DirectX exceptionally well. However ATi has always been lacking good OpenGL support.
The Rage technology is primarily focused on texture streaming, now sadly, texture streaming is a horribly slow process. As it requires the data to be loaded to RAM and then streamed to GPU-RAM. This is an exceptionally slow process.
PC has always avoided streaming content by having a massive amount of GPU-/RAM, allowing all the content required for a particular level to be already loaded. Consoles on the other hand are designed to stream massive amounts of data continuously.
In many cases the problem is not with Rage but with poor driver support. In many cases you should be thanking id software for forcing them to improve their drivers and subsequently their performance.
04/10/2011 at 15:47 Khemm says:
Soooo… thank you id for making a crappy engine tailored for consoles?
04/10/2011 at 16:17 Starky says:
You really didn’t read what he said did you? or just read what you wanted to read.
Like it or not this engine does highlight a flaw in the PC ram/g-ram relationship – and mostly a flaw in driver design, one that should be fixed and should have been fixed YEARS ago – but wasn’t because PCs can just fix any data transfer issue in games by upping the ram requirement.
PC games use 5 times more graphics ram than they need too – it’s sloppy an inefficient, and just because ram is cheap and graphics card makers can just slap on more ram doesn’t fix the issue.
Not if we want technology to progress, mega textures is a new concept, one which might in a few years time (and Rage is very much an alpha of the technology) offer texture resolution so high that there will be no such thing as texture settings in game because any system will be able to run at massively high resolution textures.
04/10/2011 at 16:29 cliffski says:
But id aren’t people who write drivers, they are making a game, and apparently, selling it at full price on the PC, which means that, love it or hate it, they have to work around the particular issues that the PC has, as a gaming platform.
Just recompiling your console game with its console-focused engine and hoping for the best is fine, but expect pc gamers to be angry as hell and not to buy it.
I find the whole issue of texture change speed to be a pain on ALL graphics cards, but I dont just ship a slow, buggy game and point the finger at driver programmers, but I go to horrid pains to write my engine around that issue. That’s what you do, when you make PC games.
04/10/2011 at 16:50 Starky says:
Cliffski, id didn’t recompile anything, seriously watch Carmacks quakecon 2011 keynote.
While I with you that id perhaps needed to bend more to the limitations of PC hardware design, and probably wouldn’t have had these issues – they’d have had to fundamentally change what they were trying to achieve.
id have never been about just making games though have they? They’ve (and carmack especially) have always been about pushing technology to it’s absolute limit.
From what carmack says (and his speech is pretty open and frank) there pretty much was no way around the limitations – either they had to put up with some texture loading issues, or abandon mega-texturing entirely.
PC graphics drivers are in a piss poor state, you as a game developer should know that better than me (I’m a electronics hardware guy, my programming doesn’t go much beyond C in micro processors), and it is something that needs to be highlighted in order to force Nvidia and ATI to do something about their fractured per application patching approach to driver design.
you could reasonably argue that id are not the ones to do it, and I’d somewhat agree with you – but I’m just glad someone has.
04/10/2011 at 15:45 Khemm says:
Didn’t expect such a shoddy CONSOLE PORT from id. FoV can be fixed. Mouse acceleration can be fixed. Textures looking like blurry crap and streaming contantly users cannot fix.
Rage was developed with xbox in mind, and it shows in spades. What a backstabbing move, id = the new Epic Games. And that’s not a compliment.
05/10/2011 at 08:51 EOT says:
That’s a bit unfair to Epic. Gears of war was/is a fun series. When was the last time id made a good game? I don’t like arena shooters and because Doom 3 was dross that would make Carmack and co’s last ‘decent’ game Doom 2. So in over 15 years they’ve apparently made nothing noteworthy. Good going those Texas boys.
05/10/2011 at 09:03 MrMud says:
Gears 3 is actually really, really good and its a great shame that it isnt avaliable for PC.
04/10/2011 at 15:46 jellydonut says:
So it’s a shit game on consoles, and won’t even run on the PC.
Way to shit on your legacy, id. Should have quit while you were on top.
04/10/2011 at 15:47 neolith says:
Hmmm… guess now I know why Prey2 doesn’t use this engine…
04/10/2011 at 15:47 Creeping Death says:
So uh… this is the same engine they are using for Doom 4 right? :(
04/10/2011 at 16:01 JoeFX69 says:
I hate games being forced out despite bugs. Especially with todays multi-million dollar budgets. Imagine going to see The Dark Knight Rises in a few months only to find the intro freezes, major plot developments are sabotaged by actors not hitting their marks, or the cinema BSOD half way through. Its totally unacceptable.
But to be fair to id, Quake 2 was a mess when it was released. The sound didnt work on all machines properly, graphics were garbled due to OpenGL and Glide driver issues, but patch after patch was released which fixed the major bugs early on, then ironed it out gradually toward the finished 3.20.
Im hopeful that this wont be another Fallout 3 or Oblivion.
04/10/2011 at 16:02 Irishjohn says:
Boo urns to that. I’m an a Radeon and there’ll be no change then. Still, hoping you can sort this out and get us a Wot I Think. I had been avoiding news about Rage but now that it’s out I want a couple of opinions before I pull the trigger. If I pull it. The trigger, I mean.
04/10/2011 at 16:03 Zarunil says:
To be fair, looking around was only added late in the development process.
04/10/2011 at 17:59 unsane says:
But… But… Does it use Visible Legs Technology (TM)?
04/10/2011 at 19:55 Mollusc Infestation says:
Only if you have a dedicated VLT processing board.
04/10/2011 at 16:19 Lobotomist says:
Now i know why they called the game : “Rage”
Its what you experience if you are PC player that preordered the game.
04/10/2011 at 16:21 PaulMorel says:
darn it. Why did I get sucked into the marketing for this game and preorder it?
04/10/2011 at 16:35 Ultra-Humanite says:
So shocking they didn’t send out review copies.
04/10/2011 at 16:37 magnus says:
Is the headache I’ve got because this cold I have or is it because of my almost constant face-palming at this negative crap from smart-arses who’ll secretly buy Rage in spite of themselves?
04/10/2011 at 19:35 Durkonkell says:
Must be cool being able to read people’s minds. And over the Internet too!
Ooh, maybe that has something to do with your headache!
04/10/2011 at 23:22 magnus says:
Well when your head explodes that’ll be my fault, Darryl Revok’s got nothing on me!
04/10/2011 at 16:40 Nallen says:
It’s a pretty sad day when the new flagship titles from first Crytek and now it seems id are buggy sub-standard graphical affairs with a lack of options and obvious console limitations. Does it say ‘press start to begin’? So sad.
Still on the plus side October/November were looking very expensive so I’ll hold fire on this and take the Team ICO HD Collection as my console port of choice and enjoy what would appear to be the significantly better gaming experience.
04/10/2011 at 19:54 iniudan says:
The lack of advanced graphical option is because Rage is auto-adjusting to your PC to try to get 60fps, not because it lack setting, you just cannot adjust them. (Still think it is a mistake, but it not consolisation)
Most of the graphic issue right now seem to indicate driver issue, id cannot do much about nvidia and AMD been slow to update OpenGL driver, especially since id 5 tech is the first major engine to push OpenGL capability in quite a while, it even use OpenGL 4.2 which was release in August, so video card chipset manufacturer were really not ready for it. So once driver updated we will see what we can blame on id.
But from what I have seen while playing, all issue seem to come from driver right for me, for game run silky smooth and graphic look extremely well if I am standing still, while I am moving I feel like it try to stab me in the eye due to all the graphical glitch, but outside of those it seemed fully playable and enjoyable to me.
Also has for the texture quality, even id said themselves they had to multiple professional compression to fit the game for distribution, the release version on all format is 20-25gb, while the shiny version (with uncompressed texture) is 120gb (which I hope they release at later date for PC).
04/10/2011 at 16:47 Zepp says:
Shitty console turd.
04/10/2011 at 16:52 takfar says:
This has fortunately not yet been released in Brazil, so I was able to send a request for preorder cancellation on Steam. Might check it out down the line if/when a discounted/expanded “game of the year” comes out.
04/10/2011 at 16:54 Nallen says:
Edit: Double post
04/10/2011 at 16:58 Milky1985 says:
“On top of that, the mouse cursor moves at about twice the speed in menus as it does in the game itself, which makes it crazy-hard to control when you’re flicking through the inventory or accepting quests. ”
Prefer that to the issue i have with dead island, where the pointer in the menu goes 10 times SLOWER than the turning speed in game. It makes it a paint to swtich wepaons… in a game with degrable weapons you have to switch.
Kinda worried about rage now, literally puchased it last night (and its all preloaded ready for me on steam) :/
Also how long did you spend staring at that lady to get the cropped screenshot!
04/10/2011 at 17:02 GallonOfAlan says:
Looks like maybe a driver issue – according to the ATI/AMD twitter feed the Rage patch has ‘very old OGL components’.
04/10/2011 at 17:04 Scatterbrainpaul says:
Question…. Is it now too risky to buy a pc game on day 1? We seem to be having more and more examples of buggy day one releases even for the AAA Games.
If you only want a game for singleplayer I see no harm in waiting a couple of months for the price to be reduced and for the bugs to be fixed
04/10/2011 at 20:12 iniudan says:
Yes, wait if you don’t pre-order, think most of the current issue will be corrected on short term, for mostly seem to be driver issue (game run smoothly on my computer outside of graphical glitch that try to stab me in the eye, and it look pretty when not glitching)
The high number of graphical issue is most likely just due to id using OpenGL 4.2, which is a recent update of OpenGL, while also been the first game engine in a while to push OpenGL capability.
The only part I kind of fear might stay once driver are patched are the texture popping, since the engine is specialized in streaming texture, so it adapted to work smoothly while looking pretty in a low memory environment, just not sure what adaptation are available for higher memory system like on a PC.
04/10/2011 at 17:06 vodkarn says:
I’m not trying to be an ass here, but who the hell is surprised by all these problems? Id have gone out of their WAY to repeatedly prove that they’ve moved away from PC gaming. I’m not going to hate them for it, but this is par for the course guys.
It’s sad we have to expect this kind of mediocre work, but we do. I am sorry for anyone who bought this though.
I’m less looking forward to the ‘see this is why PC game creation is hard now!’ from id.
04/10/2011 at 17:07 feda says:
And not a cent was given to Bethesda by me that day…
I’ll try the free full version demo, though ;)
04/10/2011 at 17:44 rayne117 says:
YOU’RE LITERALLY RIPPING MONEY OUT OF THE DESIGNERS’ POCKETS.
No.. wait, you’re just testing the game to make sure it won’t bug out on your system. Carry on.
04/10/2011 at 17:08 Khemm says:
IMPORTANT INFO!!!
Everyone, including Alec Meer – please don’t use the “performance driver”, the one on the site is old. It’ll be posted later:
http://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator
I think the article needs to be updated for now.
04/10/2011 at 17:08 SwiftRanger says:
Wait, a new Bethesda published release that’s buggy on PC? Well, you don’t say, I am baffled, absolutely astonished.
Oblivion and Fallout 3 even now don’t work on my rig while every other game works just fine. After the disastrous Brink launch I am kinda seeing a pattern.
04/10/2011 at 17:36 Teddy Leach says:
Mmm… It doesn’t bode well for Skyrim.
04/10/2011 at 17:20 Milky1985 says:
Reading through the steam forums it lokos like the video config file has been found, but just like with bulletstorm (it was stupid then and its stupid now) they have encrypted it for no apparent reasons what so ever.
In a game that doesn’t really have a FPS multiplayer mode!!!!!
04/10/2011 at 17:32 vandinz says:
This is from Catalyst creator on Twitter
All – don’t use the current Rage performance driver – package includes very old OGL files, that’s why you’re seeing corruption etc.
and then
New Rage driver with proper OGL component will be posted later today
Hope that helps ATI owners.
04/10/2011 at 17:34 zergrush says:
Hm, the “demo” is running quite well on my laptop so far, the texture popping doesn’t happen all the time but when it does it’s quite annoying.
If I didn’t have a Radeon on my desktop It would be a certain purchase, but as it is I’ll have to wait until the issues are solved.
04/10/2011 at 17:42 rayne117 says:
Getting really hard to defend PC gaming when 1/4 of the games I have bought in the last year don’t work.
I love you Just Cause, BC2, and all the others… but I shall never play you until I get rid of this piece of shit Radeon 5770 and it’s horrible crashing drivers and display problems.
04/10/2011 at 17:47 psyk says:
“but I shall never play you until I get rid of this piece of shit Radeon 5770 and it’s horrible crashing drivers and display problems.”
equals crap games? surely it equals crap gpu manufacturer?
04/10/2011 at 19:39 chackosan says:
Weird, I’ve clocked over 270 hours in Just Cause 2, playing with an MSI Radeon 5770, with nary a bug/crash in sight.
05/10/2011 at 04:46 wazups2x says:
My friend and I have had zero issues with our 5770′s. It sounds like a problem with your PC. Maybe a corrupt driver?
05/10/2011 at 08:30 PoulWrist says:
Yeah you probably have a faulty card :p RMA that shit. I have been rocking a Radeon 5870 for near 2 years now and there’s never been a problem with it.
04/10/2011 at 17:43 Demiath says:
I’m usually not particularly vocal on the whole console-ification controversy (at least not when it comes to the strictly technical details), but an id game with no graphic options does make me sad…
04/10/2011 at 17:52 Gunrun says:
So it looks like if you have an nvidia card you’re pretty much in the clear besides not being able to change graphics settings (ie it actually runs?) I have a pretty cheap preorder down so I don’t want to cancel particularly…
04/10/2011 at 18:13 sneetch says:
Some nVidia users are reporting problems but nothing like the problems ATI users are having.
04/10/2011 at 17:54 Gunrun says:
ATI/AMD have had rubbish OpenGL support for ages and ages. Anyone who plays IL2 knows that using perfect settings on ATI involves flipping a coin every time you update your drivers to see if you have broken graphics. AMD just don’t care about OpenGL.
04/10/2011 at 18:14 ResonanceCascade says:
Can someone tell me where this use of “iD” with a capital “D” comes from? I’ve noticed it for years and I’ve never figured out why people go out of their way to type it that way when all their boxes say “id” on them. Seems a bit silly.
04/10/2011 at 20:13 Dervish says:
The Doom wiki has a suggestion:
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Id_Software
There’s probably some mind-mingling with the Wolf 3D version of the logo as well.
04/10/2011 at 21:35 Heisenberg says:
i wondered that too.
i think its just because when ppl imagine what the id logo looks like they imagine that what they saw is the ‘d’ to be a capital because of the font.
thats why i did anyway.because i never played the game called iD on the zx spectrum so it couldnt of been that.
04/10/2011 at 18:42 Zarunil says:
God, please let Skyrim be full of awesome instead of another crappy PC port. If it’s shit I’m going to explode.
04/10/2011 at 19:14 CommanderJ says:
Hrm well from my point of view, Oblivion sucked, Fallout 3 sucked (New Vegas from Obsidian was pretty descent tho) so I don’t see much reason why Skyrim will be any good.
And yes, yes I know lots of people liked Oblivion, it just didn’t seem like any kind of RPG to me. Just a bland sandbox.
04/10/2011 at 19:31 Avish says:
And this is why I am not pre-ordering Skyrim.
I believe that, even if it will be released in a less than decent condition, it will be patched and modded after a few months into a playable state .
04/10/2011 at 18:54 Renfield says:
I love the strategically chosen (second) example screenshot!
That said, this is very ugly. And I don’t mean the midriff.
04/10/2011 at 19:37 Fwiffo says:
This hasn’t been a good year for those solely interested in big multiplat releases.
04/10/2011 at 20:09 Hodge says:
Hey Alec, maybe this could help you out!
(sorry)
04/10/2011 at 20:13 Sir-Lucius says:
Luckily I haven’t had any performance problems with Rage, and as much as I was disheartened to see no graphics options, the engine seems to be pulling it’s weight in “auto-detecting” the best settings for my system. It both looks and runs great. I do wonder if my having a monstrous 16GB of RAM, as well as a Nvidia card, has anything to do with that though, since from what I’ve read the texture streaming process works by loading the textures into the RAM and then sending that information to the GPU. I haven’t checked to see exactly how much CPU/RAM Rage is eating up while running, but if that is how the process works I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that’s why I haven’t run into any of the problems others have had.
As for the game itself, I’ve only played for about an hour and half so far, but it seems like some of the criticisms are a bit unwarranted, at least when you look at Rage in comparison to other popular titles. Many of the criticisms about the quest structure/storyline could VERY easily be applied to Borderlands, which was met with an overall much better reception than Rage has been so far. And outside of the setting (which is more Mad Max than Fallout) the comparisons to Fallout and other FPS/RPG hybrids is a bit out of place too, since there aren’t really any RPG elements to the game. At least, not so far. You get a task, you go kill people, you complete task. It’s much more of a straightforward shooter than anything else. And that being said, the gun play is far better than either Borderlands OR Fallout, so it surpasses both games in that regard.
Hopefully id can quickly iron out the problems people are having. As a 3D artist I can definitely see the appeal of working with an engine like id Tech 5, and I think if more people got a taste of it working properly there would be a lot less negativity towards it as a whole. As for the game being a console port? No way. People seem overly eager to toss that phrase around at the slightest HINT of a bug or issue in a modern PC game. Just because a game isn’t perfect out of the box doesn’t automatically make it a console port. Unoptimized? Buggy? Poorly coded or tested? Sure. But the game is clearly not a console port going by the most derogatory definition of the phrase.
04/10/2011 at 22:48 Shortwave says:
I’m also curious if the game is utilizing that 16gb by the way.
They sell for 100 bucks these days and it’s on my list of things to get!
05/10/2011 at 02:26 Sir-Lucius says:
Well it’s certainly not an issue of RAM as Rage only seems to use up around 550MB. Maybe VRAM? Although I know I’ve seen people with GPU’s with as much or more VRAM as my GTX470 having problems. It’s not HDD speed in relation to streaming either as I’ve heard people with the game installed on a SSD are having the texture pop-in problem as well. I guess I’ll just consider myself lucky. I haven’t had any performance problems in any other recent games known to have issues either (Brink comes to mind).
And yeah, RAM prices have dropped ludicrously. I remember when I first built this system it was like $100 for a 6 gig kit. You can now regularly get 8 gig kits for half that. I just bought another 8 gigs today since Newegg was running a sale. $40 for 8 gigs of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM? That’s too good to pass up.
04/10/2011 at 20:20 catmorbid says:
Sounds like a bad fucking console port. Since we’re talking about id, I should be surprised, but sadly I’m not. The technical hickups can and will be fixed eventually, but stuff like the UI issues mentioned (mouse acceleration, mouse speed differs in menus and lack of graphical options) just reek of a bad fucking console port. Unfuckingforgivable. Every self-aware PC-user should just pirate the hell out of this game, to show our appreciation for their sense of quality. After superb PC titles like witcher 2 we deserve better. This is simply unforgivable, so speak with your wallet!
04/10/2011 at 20:37 alundra says:
@catmorbid
“Unfuckingforgivable. Every self-aware PC-user should just pirate the hell out of this game, to show our appreciation for their sense of quality. After superb PC titles like witcher 2 we deserve better. This is simply unforgivable, so speak with your wallet!”
Actually, every self-aware pc user should have an ounce of dignity and stay away from this crap, it’s not even worth the download, do not pirate this load of dung, if we really intend to show “appreciation for their sense of quality.”
04/10/2011 at 22:45 Shortwave says:
I’m sadly not surprised either.
I actually anticipated it and stopped myself from buying it yesterday.
04/10/2011 at 20:23 RyuRanX says:
Et tu, id Software? As a id fan who played all of their games from the very beginning I’m very disappointed with the lack of effort they putted on the PC version.
04/10/2011 at 20:24 DigitalSignalX says:
It’s Crysis 2 all over again. Powerhouse PC developer putting the big dog and pony dance while trying to hide the fact the fact they’ve been chained to an Xbox.
04/10/2011 at 22:44 Shortwave says:
Huh?
I still think it’s one of the best looking games of this year.
Have you tried to TOTALLY maxed out? (Including high res pack and DX11 / Tess)
At first the patches sorta destroyed my 6950, but when I tried again recently it work WAY WAY better and I was usually always above 40fps. And with that being said, it was totally fucking gorgeous. In MP I’d drop it down to “high” to get 60+ and it still looks better than any FPS on the market.
And I’ll even debate BF3 doesn’t even hold up to it very well either. It’s just sad that not too many mods have been released for it yet. Right next to Crysis 2 for graphics 2011 is likely The Witcher 2. That game totally pushed some boundaries graphically. Hard Reset is up there… Red Orc 2 has it’s appeal but too many issues to OFFICIALLY get included in this list ATM.
05/10/2011 at 04:49 wazups2x says:
This is MUCH worse than Crysis 2.
04/10/2011 at 20:47 Shooop says:
It’s almost eerie I just ordered a nVida card not two days ago.
Even if you didn’t get to actually write a review of the game, I applaud you for being so quick to actually try playing it and post this.
04/10/2011 at 22:37 Shortwave says:
It made me shutter, knowing that was his only solution.
I have a lower end GTX420 laying around because I’m a burnout but like..
I’d never fucking go and buy a decent card just because it worked better on the other brand.
Either way really! Would be pretty bad if that was the reality of the future of GPUs.
A joke I know, but it sadly seems like that at times.
HM.
04/10/2011 at 21:00 tomemozok says:
What don’t you understand…Rage was developed for consoles,even Carmack himself confirmed it.
It is a fun idea for a new game,but we’ll need to w8 for a proper pc release (A patch witch will be in ~ 1 month from now).
W8 for the new doom if you want a real id game for hardcore pc scary-horror-shooter game :D
I know i will :D
04/10/2011 at 22:34 Shortwave says:
Everyone understands this.
But we were hoping he was going to show that he could push the consoles to their limits while still getting 60fps and STILL pleasing all of the PC community with our version. He forewarned the pop up textures but it really seems a lot worse in-front of us now. Coupled with missing options that we just expect as PC gamers missing and AGAIN WITH BULLSHIT FOV ISSUES.
So yes, “we” thought he wanted to spread the love.
But now “we” realize it’s looking pretty grim.
Shit happens man, what can you say?
: (
04/10/2011 at 22:46 Thants says:
The time saved by typing “w8″ isn’t worth it.
05/10/2011 at 10:48 Syra says:
Uh if you let them think this is okay, who is to say doom4 which is clearly also a ‘consoles first’ game won’t have the same bullshit wrong with it.
id nee to wise up!
04/10/2011 at 21:13 jonfitt says:
This is the one good thing about pre-orders (when coupled with review copies going out before the release). If people cancel pre-orders now it is a clear message that initial reports form the game are not favourable.
04/10/2011 at 22:29 Shortwave says:
For this company to release a game on PC lacking so many PC features and requirements is fairly belittling. I hope they will understand that.
But yes I’m sure it’ll all get sorted out eventually.. We can hope.
I’m just happy I fought my urge to order it yesterday to have it today after work.
All I’d of had is a headache! This game goes to the “Get it on sale maybe” list.
Thanks for the honest review.
04/10/2011 at 22:36 Aufero says:
Given that I won’t be replacing my Radeon any time soon, (nothing to do with brand loyalty, I just didn’t budget for another graphics card this year) I think I’ll skip this mess.
04/10/2011 at 22:38 Hakkesshu says:
Someone on Guru3d posted the updated drivers:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=351811
I have no idea how he got them, but they fucking work perfectly. The game runs nigh flawlessly on my HD 5770 now. Seems like much of the fault really does lie with ATI.
04/10/2011 at 23:31 Mollusc Infestation says:
It’s on the AMD site as well now.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx
05/10/2011 at 00:12 alundra says:
@Hakkesshu
Well, if you take in account the following:
-Nearly every other game works fine on radeon hardware.
-The game was clearly designed for the X360 which happens to have older ati hardware.
-There are also issues with Nvidia hardware, albeit not as bad.
-They’ve already released two driver updates for the game, in less than 24hours.
It’s hard to blame it on amd that a company releases a game in an unfinished state for US customers to beta test instead of doing proper in house testing, a game that was designed with the limitations of consoles in minds, and that refuses to natively run on more advanced hardware than it was designed for.
Only id/bethesda is at fault here.
05/10/2011 at 00:34 LostViking says:
I agree.
While the game runs OK on my Nvidia card, there are plenty of graphical issues. Not being able to change anything except AA and resolution doesn’t help either.
04/10/2011 at 23:12 PeteC says:
This is one reason why I rarely, if ever purchase day one.
04/10/2011 at 23:42 Arglebargle says:
Rather than a single main issue, Rage’s faceplant looks to be a combination of a bunch of problems: New engine, auto-detection of graphics not functioning properly, bad driver support, version control errors, bad QA, early release, console compatibility screw ups, canned reviews, etc.
Oh, wait, maybe that is sorta the standard problem with big games releases these days…..
04/10/2011 at 23:45 Branthog says:
The newest new driver of the day has improved FPS, but I still get hangs for ten seconds at a time about every twenty or thirty seconds and awful screen tearing. The hangs are really not tolerable. Guess we’ll have to wait another day and see what comes of it.
Oh, nevermind. Now I’m getting crash-to-desktop after it plays the Bethesda logo, like everyone else. Fuck it. I’m done for today.
04/10/2011 at 23:56 Stepout says:
Currently re-installing my OS because I tried un-installing the borked Rage Performance Driver, which caused all of my USB drivers to not longer work. After 4 hours of trying to get them to work with only a PS/2 keyboard to use, I just gave up. If id had a face, I’d punch it.
05/10/2011 at 00:20 MFToast says:
As far as the graphical issues go, not so surprised. Of course any game can have graphical glitches, especially when you buy cheap hardware. My main concern is with the console UI issues, such as the slow mouse stuff. It can’t see how it would take a whole lot to tweak it just a little bit to make things easier for someone with a mouse, and this is really surprising to see from the cool grandpa with candy of computer games, id.
Can the blame be placed on Zenimax, perhaps? Still, though, from a realistic standpoint, if you’ve bought the game and it sucks, there’s really nothing you can do. Even as far as bad reviews go, they’ll even go so far as to yank it if it reaches too many consumers.
Companies such as this only speak the language of money. Stop giving them your money, and they’ll be forced to either consider making a more PC specific UI, or they can just hop on the console wagon and leave room for more pure PC companies to move in. End rant.
05/10/2011 at 00:30 LostViking says:
They better release a patch for this stat, or id will take a grave hit to their reputation in the PC community.
I was really hyped for this game, and honestly thought it was developed for the PC first and then downsized for consoles later after watching a dozen John Carmack interviews.
Looking at the final product there is no way this can have been designed first and foremost for PC’s.
05/10/2011 at 00:26 LostViking says:
Would just like to jump in and defend AMD here. I used to be an ATI-fanboy, but eventually got a GTX470 for my new gaming rig after getting pissed of with my HD5870 not working properly unless I used ancient drivers.
Anywho, the game has plenty of issues with my GTX470 as well. Terrible pop in when you turn the camera, textures blurring in and screen tear from hell. And while the graphics options aren’t card related, it is pretty shamefull that they don’t allow you to play with the settings in the PC version.
Come on iD, is it that hard to make a proper PC version!
I know it doesn’t matter that it says “saving, don’t turn off your computer” while saving, but you would think an experienced PC developer don’t expect their users to turn off their PC in the half second it takes to save!
By changing that small text they would at least give the impression of having spent some time on the PC version.
05/10/2011 at 04:43 wazups2x says:
Wow, you can’t even adjust your graphics settings?
id has gone downhill big time.
05/10/2011 at 10:44 quicktooth says:
I wish to subtly indicate support for the Three Golden Rules of commenting on RPS. Without using actual direct words. My linguistics major pays off yet again! Comments on that story were locked, so I added one here! Is this related to Rage? Is it some sort of PUN? Irony? What was I just thinking about? I don’t remember and am too lazy to look, so let me just subtly suggest that RPS has good posting :D.
05/10/2011 at 12:58 subkamran says:
If there’s not a patch out by the time I’m done with work, I’m driving 5 mins to my Redbox and picking up Rage for any console it has available (360 or PS3, I don’t discriminate).
This is absolutely ridiculous. I preordered this for PC, picked it up, and didn’t get it working all night. Literally spent 2+ hours trying to get it to work.
As far as I see it, I got $25 off my preorder. That’s basically a $25 credit to Redbox. So, sure, I’ll beat the game on 360/PS3, and whenever id deigns to fix this game, I’ll play it on PC.
And people wonder whenever I make the comment that I will sometimes just buy games for my consoles to save the headache. CASE. IN. POINT.
08/11/2011 at 23:47 GlassDeviant says:
A textbook example of why price/performance is a poor measure of which graphics platform is the best. Granted, you want blisteringly fast graphics, but if the cost of the supposed “best” (which historically has only been ATi maybe half of the time historically) is buggy drivers by programmers who admittedly are slacking on their updates (as indicated in the article) and poor support provided by technicians (who are notoriously incapable of dealing with normal human beings, regardless of what company they work for) rather than tech support people with technical knowledge then you are the architect of your own downfall.
I have had only one problem with Rage that is related to graphics in the three days that I have played the game on my dual-SLI nVidia 470s, which is pretty much in line with my lifetime experience with ATI and nVidia:
4 ATI cards, only 1 did not give me constant, aggravating problems.
14 nVidia cards, only 1 ever gave me significant problems that couldn’t be fixed in short order with minimal game impact, because I bought an “MX” model (big mistake).