If both of you actually read the article you'll see theres NO benchmarks here, due to current buggy drivers and the 60FPS cap. This is why no one has benchmarked the game yet.
The game runs at a constant 60FPS on almost any remotely decent hardware. Considering how good the game looks, and with early drivers too, thats very impressive. Whats even more impressive is that the console versions looks almost exactly as good as the PC version and always run at 60FPS too. For consoles it's the best looking game around, easily. But John Carmack worked on the engine so i'm not that surprised, literally no one can match him.
I also love how the textures never repeat. Every single area is unique.
I beat the game and boarderlands is definitely a better game by a long shot. The game is very linear, their is basically not story, the character has no option but to following along. There are no video settings; the resolution cannot be changed, the quality of the video cannot be changed. Things get very repetitive. Playing the game on veteran, was easy to beat the enemy; no challenge at all. If anyone has not bought the game yet, wait for the price to drop, because this game is not worth more than $10.
I agree. The game just seems to visit and revisit the same "hey that was a good job their buddy, you sure are a badass...but I got some more Shhhhh** for you to do." The dialogue is pretty mundane.
I will say the artwork and time put into the environment, soundtrack etc is quite impressive and pulls you in which helps out the weak story and repetitiveness of the gameplay. I guess at the end of the day all shooters like this have a linear and less than interesting storyboard.
As far as running the game I am running a GTX 590 Classified and it is just beautiful. Runs like butter...I've had no driver issues thus. I'm using a Nvidia beta driver 285.38 that seems to be trouble free. I haven't noticed some of the aforementioned bugs or otherwise in-game.
Like "abzillah" said I do think "Borderlands" blows this effort away and had a truly unique skin and gameplay that set it apart from the competition.
Rage is worth getting but falls short of the hype. Then again, most games do.
I don't see the point outside of the scope of this game.
Rage uses very unconventional render passes, I think they're the only engine that uses megatextures.The reason they have all these issues is because they have not followed standard rendering procedures.
megatextures were used in ETQW & they turned out fine there
apparently brink & wolfenstein dont, & maybe not prey 2 either
one of the things i saw with people that had unplayable performance was that the game thought they had a 3mhz single core cpu, so the auto scaler of the game was calculating the wrong way... i say they should just have an option to ignore everything & run fixed settings (can be a console command, doesnt need to be in the menu)
LOL what benchmark are you speaking of? Why on earth would you comment on an article you didn't read???? Drag yourself into the street and shoot yourself, thx.
I'm pretty sure that's the issue he's having with the poster... He commented without even reading the article. Negativity without any cause is just moronic.
What is it with games these days? It seems like nearly every game, even highly anticipated games are broken, have features missing or have serious flaws when they're first released. Its like AMD and Nvidia dont give them any attention until they are released and people are complaining.
Back when I was just knee-high to a bullfrog, I seem to remember having some technical difficulties with Ultima VII. In that case, it was certainly worth the aggravation. It's not a new phenomenon, but in fairness, games and the platforms they run on are much more complicated now. In between the time you spend with Microsoft for your Xbox version and Sony for your PS3 version, you have to find time to work with AMD/nVidia for your PC version. Technical issues are bad, but giving me a barely-warmed over console port is the worse sin. Sometimes the itchy rash of consolitis is minor, like some small UI issues (Press the Start Button!). Other times, it's deeply annoying, making me wonder if the developers have actually ever played a PC game before. Some games, like TES:Oblivion, have issues that can be corrected later by a dedicated mod community -- another important element for the identity of PC gaming.
So while technical issues at launch for a game that's been in development for 3 to 5 years are inexcusable, there are some issues that are worse. Inane plots, bad mechanics, and me-too gameplay styles are making me question how committed some companies are to making PC gaming worthwhile (for consumers and therefore the industry as well). The PC is far and away the finest gaming platform, but some developers really need to try harder. Maybe PC gamers just expect more, but I say that we're a forgiving bunch -- but you have to bring your (triple) A-game.
id claims the problems were mostly driver incompatibilities, which is a story we've all heard before.
I wish publishers would include the drivers they qualified their games on as an optional part of their release. In an ideal situation the current and/or beta drivers already on your system would be fine and you wouldn't need them. But in the all too common screwed up situation, you could at least install those particular drivers for this particular game and know it was supposed to work.
Why is it nvidia/AMD's job to fix games? they do it, but they shouldn't need to. The drivers are out, they exist, they are speced.
And every single indie developer manages to make games that work without a driver update. Meanwhile major A titles ofter are released buggy and then nVidia and AMD scramble to hack it to so that the drivers identify the EXE and fix it. For example, Both companies gut the AA process included in most games and forces it to use a proper & modern AA solution for better quality and performance. (MSAA has been obsolete for years.)
Most major AA titles have the developers in contact with NVIDIA and AMD, and they tell the GPU guys what stuff isn't working well and needs fixing (although anecdotally, I hear NVIDIA is much better at responding to requests). This is particularly true when a game does something "new", i.e. an up-to-date OpenGL release when we really haven't seen much from that arena in a while. I agree with the above post that says the devs should state what driver version they used for testing, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's covered by an NDA with the GPU companies.
All Rage really needed to do was check your driver version, and if you're using an older driver than the game was designed for, pop up a message telling you to update your driver, with a link to download it from AMD/nvidia's website. They knew perfectly well that the game was broken on all but the latest drivers that were being released alongside the game, and few people were going to have those drivers installed when they tried playing the game for the first time, but they didn't do anything to let people know that beforehand.
I'm a big fan of id and I'm enjoying Rage, but they really dropped the ball with this game's launch.
erm... it's not the chip makers responsibility to ensure a game runs - they certainly can and do help the devs, but QA should be part of the development / release cycle. in this context what's happening with Rage is just silly - your product either runs with the currently available drivers or you don't release it - it should be that simple.
"Until then, Rage remains an impressive technology demonstration and a game that some people will certainly enjoy; it’s just not a good benchmark for us right now."
the game would've qualified as "an impressive technology demonstration" had it come out on in a somewhat playable state. it didn't. oddly enough, however, the tone of most reviews I've seen remains positive.
This totally depends on your hardware. It ran fine on my system prior to the patch, albeit with the beta NVIDIA drivers. I think it's mostly on lower spec machines and/or AMD GPUs that people are having problems.
I was hoping you could comment on what version of OpenGL id Tech 5 is using? I'm under the impression that it's using OpenGL 2.1 + a ton of extensions. Do you think it would have been easier for AMD and nVidia to support if id had stuck to a more standard OpenGL implementation such as stock OpenGL 3.0?
And any word on adding OpenCL support for GPGPU transcode? In earlier conference presentations, id said they were looking at a variety of options of including CUDA and OpenCL. I'm surprised they didn't go with OpenCL seeing it would have supported both CPUs and AMD and nVidia GPUs instead of requiring a separate codepath for nVidia GPUs and a CPU codepath for everything else. Certainly now that OpenGL 1.1 drivers are available for AMD CPUs and GPUs, nVidia GPUs, and Intel CPUs and soon Ivy Bridge, now is definitely the time for the first OpenCL accelerated game.
The context that Rage creates is an OpenGL 3.2 context. But I could not tell you off of the top of my head what they're using from OpenGL 3.x, but OpenGL is nebulous in general like that. Given that they're using a 3.2 context, I wouldn't be too worried about what specific features they are or are not using. It's not like OpenGL 4.x where there are specific headliner features (e.g. tessellation) that people are familiar with.
As for OpenCL, the last thing I heard was the famous post a couple of weeks ago about CUDA, which noted that OpenCL was a performance issue. There hasn't been any news on that.to which I'm aware of.
On Beyond3D in the PC Gaming forum, NV's Evan Hart (engineer behind most of the GPU transcoding) stopped by and mentioned that OpenCL was tested perhaps years ago on older hardware and it performed poorly at the time. Apparently it was not further explored. I'm not sure which company lacked the motivation to go further with it.
a better path is just to wait 2 years and see if a modding community has formed around a game. If it has, chances are good that it is a decent game and you will be able to amp up the experience with content from from people who just love gaming [and boobies, ;) ].
Yep, it's a good rule of the thumb! My latest encounter was my beloved Dungeon Siege 3 game. The port was so horrendous it got me so upset I spent hours writing up a FAQ to help others perform basic functions like properly move around.
My nephews refuse to play an FPS games on their consoles and prefer them on the PC. Other games such as fighting and sports they play on the consoles. MMO is another no no on the consoles.
It's tough to say, as they look different. As a game, Crysis 2 certainly has a better story, but I haven't quite finished it yet. I'm not sure why, but Rage got me wanting to see the conclusion, and I ended up disappointed but I still finished. Crysis 2, I was playing and then paused and got distracted by something else, but I'm about 80% finished and need to go back. I'm more interested in wrapping up Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though, so Crysis 2 is on the backburner until then. Oh, and DXHR looks like crap compared to Rage and Crysis 2, but I like it more as a game. Not sure if that says more about me or the games, though.
Deus Ex: HR was supposed to be graphically superior but quite a few things got cut from the finalized game due to limited resources and wanting to make the game accessible to more configs. Or so the story goes.
Despite the graphics I found the game very fun and addicting, much to the point where I'm on a 3rd play through to see how much stuff I can find. Then I will be going back to the original Deus Ex to follow the sequence of the story and then onto Deus Ex: IW (a game known to be crippled by console requirements). It's like an interactive novel I can't put down.
Crysis 2 was pretty interesting but I got tired of it soon after. Been playing BC2 and Black Ops multiplayer for my FPS kicks. I was about to give Rage a try until I heard about the bugs.
I've only ever returned 2 games in my entire gaming life, I'm 25 years old. Even dead island didn't get returned, and that's really saying something.
The two? Unlimited Saga and RAGE.
Rage was a pain in the ass to get running right even with the upgraded drivers and config tweaks. Combine that with id pretty much saying we don't care about PC gamers and I quickly got a steam refund.
Rage has so many PC options missing its crazy. No SLI or crossfire support, baked lighting, the absence of any user config (until a patch that added a few more), 60FPS max.
Such a disappointment. id and carmak are dead to me.
On a personal level I partly disagree with the borderlands comparison. That game has more humor, limited freedom, and even some exploring. (Like those weapon caches that are semi outside the map.) It also has decent coop. The Rage npcs say more up front, where as the ones in borderlands will coment during story missions via echo. Rage feels very linear, and seems to constantly build up to something that never happens. (That last level is a major anti climax.) I did have to do some tinkering before it would run, disabling ati ai got it working.
I'm not saying the games are the same, but they feel very similar. As I noted in the conclusion, Rage makes me want to go replay Borderlands to see how it actually compares. I have a feeling I'll prefer Borderlands, if only for the semi-open world. Actually, I was just reading about Borderlands 2 in PC Gamer, which could be a better comparison if it can come out within a few months.
Borderlands 2 won't be out until 2012... unfortunately. :(
Every time I look at my Steam games list, I always kind of wonder how I spent so much time playing Borderlands (~220 hours). The game is oddly addicting for those that love dungeon crawlers or collecting loot, but I think anyone that's played it will admit that there really isn't much of a story. The game does have some pretty good dark humor though, and you may find that enjoyable.
If you also prefer getting technical about things, there's a lot of "behind the scenes" technical stuff that you can learn that will give you a better understanding of Borderlands. For example, how exactly the elemental guns work or what defines a shield's stats. I ended up looking a lot of this up, and now I can look at a model of a shield on the ground and tell if it's good or not.
If that's not enough to impress the ladies, I don't know what is! ;)
This is my first post on Anandtech ever. I've been a reader for a long time, but never felt the necessity to resort to posting prior to this moment.
So, mostly due to rageConfig.cfg misinformation on the internet, the article's verdict of RAGE as a benchmarking tool is void.
Firstly, the steam forums config doesn't do anything, if you try changing some of the environment variables written in it from the in-game console you'll notice no change. There's only a few variables worth changing. The rest is locked.
Concerning the constant-fps/variable-quality statement you'll notice that this can be easily changed to constant-quality (if you read the above link's content). Hi-res textures are enabled once you change a few variables to 16384 (read link for details).
For heavy benchmarking I'd recommend using this config:
jobs_numThreads 12 // makes big difference on AMD X6 1055T vt_maxPPF 128 // max is 128 vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 16384 vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 16384 vt_pageimagesizeunique 16384 vt_pageimagesizevmtr 16384 vt_restart r_multiSamples 32 vt_maxaniso 4 // 0-16 (32?) image_anisotropy 4 // same
CUDA transcode is not included in config because it can be changed on-demand under video options. Whereas settings such as r_multiSamples 32 cannot be set from menu (16 is highest).
Please revise the benchmarking verdict, because it doesn't do the game justice. Also, it'd make Anandtech the first site to make a real benchmark of RAGE. I'd like to see this happen :)
SSIV, you're correct that most of the variables in that config I linked didn't do anything, which is why I didn't test with them for most of the time. I ran some screenshot comparisons, shrugged, and moved on. And you might be surprised to hear that I actually already read that whole article before you every posted; I just never tried forcing the 16K textures (as the article itself states you "might" see an improvement). Anyway, I'll check 16K textures, but let me clarify a few things.
1) Setting Texture Cache to "Large" gets to very nearly the same quality as the forced 8K textures. 2) CUDA transcode was tested separately, and has no apparent impact on performance for my systems. 3) Forcing constant quality is fine, but that doesn't do anything for the 60FPS frame rate cap... 4) ...unless you force at least 16xAA, and possibly 32xAA. (I tried 32xAA once before and the game crashed, but perhaps that was a bad config file.)
Even if you can get below the 60FPS frame rate cap, however, that does not make a game a good benchmark. Testing at silly levels of detail to try to get below the frame rate cap is not useful, especially if many of the changes that will cut the frame rate down far enough result in negligible (or worse) image quality.
Thanks for the input, but unless I'm sorely mistaken this CFG file hacking still won't make Rage into a useful benchmark. Anyway, I'll investigate a few more things and add an addendum, based on what I discover.
Addendum: 16k textures do absolutely nothing for quality. What's more, you really start to run into other issues. Specifically:
1) Using a GTX 580 with 12GB of system RAM, 16k forced textures (using your above list of custom settings) causes every level to load super slow -- you can see the low-res textures, frame rate is at 1-2 FPS, and it takes 5 to 20 seconds (sometimes longer) for a level to finish loading. This is of course assuming nothing crashes, which in my limited experience over the past 30 minutes is quite common.
2) 16k textures with 8xAA enabled crashes at 2560x1600, so I had to drop to 4xAA to even get levels to attempt to load (though 1080p 8xAA works okay).
3) Even with 16k textures, the difference compared to 8k screenshots is virtually zero. Without running an image diff, I couldn't tell which looks better, but even the file sizes are nearly equal
4) Finally, even if we get rid of the 16k textures idea, 16xAA looks worse than 4xAA and 8xAA, because everything becomes overly blurred, and 32xAA looks downright awful. "Hooray! No jaggies! Boo! No detail!"
I'm aghast at the vigor of your response! Thank you for investigating and researching this Jarred Walton. With things looking as they are now I can see that not much else can be done about the benchmark verdict.
What >8xAA settings do to the game sounds worrysome however. I assume id will address this sooner or later. Because the textures load iteratively, they're blurry at first. Under heavy load the engine might only have enough time to AA the first first texture layer (might be a realtime constraint). But this is just my hypothesis, which shouldn't be true because it implies some sort of texture iteration load block.
16k has small differences, mostly on road signs and bump mapped cement blocks. But like you said, it's not a significant improvement compared to 8k.
Thank you for your effort and making an insightful review!
A 32-bit game can only allocate as much memory as 32 bits permits, which lands around 3072MiB. So unless RAGE uses PAE, which diminishes overall ram performance, your 12GiB of ram will never be utilized.
Having said that, the sentence beginning with "Using a GTX 580 with 12GB of system RAM" is slightly disappointing.
Maybe not, but his link sure did help show me what Rage can really look like. Wow! Those textures make the game look sooo much better! I'm sure an old console can't produce that clarity!
Biggest difference between 8k & 16k are signs and jagged peaks of blocks/rocks. Goes unnoticed once motion blur kicks in.
As a side note, I hope a game that'll utilize the dynamic lighting part of this game engine will appear soon. That'll be an interesting add to the Tech 5 stew.
I think these images show what I hinted at above: depending on your system and settings, if you go beyond a certain point in "quality" you may end up with inconsistent overall quality. 2560x1600 with 4xAA and 16k textures certainly did it for my GTX 580, and 1920x1080 at 8xAA seemed to do it as well. Some of the linked images show definite improvements, but interestingly there's at least one shot (Img 2) where the 8k texturing isn't consistently better than the 4k texturing -- two of the building walls as well as the distant mountains look like 1k textures or something.
If you have enough VRAM, 16k textures with 8xAA looks like the best you'll get, provided you only run at 1080p or lower resolution (or at least not 2560x1600/2560x1440). On my system, however, 16k causes problems far too often for me to recommend it. I tried binding a key to switch between 16k and 8k texture cache, and most of the time when I try switching to 16k the game crashes. I'd be curious to hear what hardware others are using (and what drivers) where 16k is stable at 2560x1600.
Ok, I realize this is just a pet peeve, but on page two there is this line.
John Carmack has stated that all of the uncompressed textures in Rage occupy around 1TB of space, so obviously that’s not something they could ship/stream to customers, as even with a 6:1 compression ration they’d still be looking at 170GB of textures.
Ration should be Ratio. Unless of course it is in fact compressed food :)
But great article otherwise. And maybe I missed it, but did you go into texture pop-in at all? It seems storage speed is a major issue in this game.
Thanks... sorry for the typo. I know the word is "ratio", but when I'm typing fast for some reason I often end up with "ration". I think it's just muscle memory from all the other words ending in "tion".
when you actually play the game, peopl eare getting mroe than just little texture pop ups, they arew getting massive driver conflicts from AMD. Like big ugly strange low res texture blocks show up all over the road in front of you, or on the hills or on objects, especially on mid range systems like AMD 6870's, its more noticable.
Purely an AMD driver is problem. It would be nice if GPU companies were encouraged before major games like RAGE are released to stores, to just maybe have someone pop into id software jsut to make sure if any dirver updates need to be done. Or maybe more team work between game developer and hardware manufactorers.
I need to test on lower end AMD hardware, but unfortunately the only hardware I have other than 5870/6950 is mobile hardware, and both laptops with 6630M GPUs will not take the reference AMD drivers. Long-term, I'm sure it will all get worked out, but of course that doesn't help if you have a Sony laptop that won't accept non-Sony driver updates. :-\
Are you running the 11.10 preview 2 drivers? Those made things far worse on my HD6870. Actually those drivers stop working, and then do a recover whenever I logged into windows. Was even giving me trouble with the intro vid. Reverting back to 11.9, and using radeonpro to run this game without ati AI more or less fixed my issues with the game.
This is due to the engine itself, or rather just the size of the game you have to download and limits of the 360 being on a dvd.
The textures the engine uses can all be utterly unique (and essentially are in RAGE thanks to precalculated lighting for every last environment pixel). They can also be unlimited in texture size, but because of the way technical mumbo jumbo this takes up a ton of disc space. So they limited it because they wanted to put it out on the 360.
But the good news is that a patch is on the way that should clear up the textures some on the pc. That and Carmack has expressed a desire to see what the game looked like when turned up to 11, and release that to the pc public. So presumably there will be some taste of an ultra sharp co-op level or something coming and we can see what Id-tech 5 will be able to do without dinky little disc space requirements holding it back.
I have beat RAGE on the normal setting; however am having a b!tch of a time on nightmare. I was able to beat Borderlands + all the DLC on the hardest setting. I love both games; I like Borderlands more; however RAGE is tougher to me. Excellent graphics on both games too. I can't wait for more patches to come down the pipe and more DLC for RAGE. Another excellent game by ID.
It is always sad for me to see that kind of video games, which I consider esthetically appalling, intellectually illiterate and psychologically gloomy.
You might argue it is what teenagers are nowadays, and there is a huge demand for ugly, stupid and gloomy games. However, I don't get used to seeing adults praise that sort of things.
About the technology. I do not think that MegaTexture is quite nice, as i feel that it's pro (non repeating textures) is overshadowed deeply by it's cons (severely HDD inefficient for memory storage, and the problems it generates when generating//editting levels), so yeah, i am personally not impressed on that very specific regard. Also you guys didn't seem to notice the total lack of dynamic lights, and how they had to butcher the texture in any dark area...
I understand your opinion and respect it, but i can't share it. Cheers!
I also feel very disappointed with the Megatexture techonology. In my PC, I have a lot of texture popping and the game is not very pretty. It's fluid, but I have lots of slowdowns. It stops for a moment every 20 seconds or so.
If I compare it with, for example, Crysis 1 it's considerably uglier and less smooth and the game pauses to load new levels quite often (every time you enter a new zone).
Rage is the worse id game I have ever seen, and I play their games since the Commander Keen times.
I think that this is be the last game I will buy from them.
Yeah, but even trying to "fix" it by making it keep a bigger amount of textures actually in memory//streaming some of it beforehand, the basis of the engine is flawed in my humble opinion.
You see, if you want dynamic lightning, then you will have to keep the textures at a higher level, thus achieving a lesser compression than they did. And there is almost no proper way to add interactive objects to the levels by the very nature of it. On top of that it also forces level designers to work constantly with the graphic artists, as every little design change has to be run again, and the base texture modified by hand and recompressed.
So, again, 21GB for just roughly 10hours of gameplay and regular to bad texture quality, how much would it be for a decent lenght and higher quality?... 40GB? 50?
Honestly i feel that developers would do better modifying idTech4 (which supported MegaTexture but didn't seem to be entirely focused on it), versus idTech5.
It's a fantastic technology all around! At least, once the dvd9 limits of the 360 can be eliminated. Doom 4, which will be a smaller area on even more dvds, should look utterly fantastic and not blurry at all.
Plus it's an incredible win from the standpoint of artists using it. No more worrying about texture size, or cramming it into memory, or you can't put this texture here, or etc.
not sure if anyone discovered/knew this before but adding the common code line terminator ";" after a command allows you to place another command on that same line. for example
vt_restart; vt_visualbenchmark 20
combining these 2 commands seems to produce consistent benchmarks results for a given area and they are very different from the vt_benchmark results. I have only tested this for about 5 mins and it seems to be a useful indicator for perfomance.
I played Borderlands and Fallout NV and enjoyed both for different reasons. I guess I'm just a post apocalyptic kind of guy. Compared to the older two Rage was down right beautiful in some parts and I couldn't help but feel awed by the surroundings.
However, it was not a game designed for my computer like mine, or gamers like me who use, a 3 - monitor (Alienware 23", 120hz), 3.8Ghz OC'ed i7 and GTX 590 type of system. Whenever I tried to run on three screen mode at full resolution, all I got was tons of texture flashing and eventually a crash with crappy performance. No matter how many settings and custom .cfg's I could find.
This game was built for a console, plain and simple. A typical sellout game that has no roots to its past nor the community that help support it. It ran beautifully at 1920x1080, big deal. Both Borderlands and Fallout NV run beautifully at 5760x1080 without missing a beat and without any fancy megatextures.
I'm guessing you'll need to wait a month or two to get three screen support working well. It's going to be mostly driver fixes/updates to enable Rage to run on three displays. Honestly, I'm surprised you haven't had more issues doing triple-head with recent releases, as that's about as bleeding-edge as you can get.
There were remarks in this article comparing Rage with Borderlands. I see no comparison whatsoever and can't see how the reviewer came up with that. Borderlands is not even in the same ballpark as Rage. Borderlands should have been called Cartoonlands.
Post apocalyptic world with mainly a desert environment? Check. Vehicles to drive? Check. NPCs and/or missions that feel hollow? Check.
Obviously the stories are different, and the gaming engines are completely different, but for someone to say you see no comparison whatsoever? You're apparently thinking that I was comparing the engines and rendering as opposed to the setting. That I'm talking about the setting should be clear from the context.
After reading threw the article, I have to say I am impressed with the title of the article. Bravo!
On another note, I absolutely love post apocolyptic type games (Borderlands and Fallout), and after reading this it really makes me what to pick it up. However, I am in the middle of Deus Ex: HR, trying to weed off my WoW addiction, and don't mind waiting for better drivers for my 6970. So I will be picking this title up soon, thanks for the opinions and generally nice article to read.
It's because many of them weren't even born when those games came out. They really have no idea.
Regardless, I think id took a wrong turn some time around id Tech 4. Q3 engine games were the smoothest twitch FPS games. Best gaming tournaments around then too.
I've been thinking about this for a few days. Obviously doing screen captures and visually comparing texture resolution is no way to go about benchmarking.
To do benchmarking properly with this engine, you'll need the cooperation of id, to make available some variables for you. Those variables would record how hard the de-rez system is working.
If you could record how much and how long the engine is forced to de-rez, you could put together some very understandable graphs. One in realtime showing how much de-rez as you play through a level, when things get busy on a slow machine you'll see a lot of de-rez. Another graph showing how much time spent at less than 100% resolution, average de-rez, etc.
The problem with this approach is that (at the moment) no other game or engine is available to compare to. It would allow you to compare different hardware.
"A second suggestion was that we force 16xAA to improve quality and put more of a load on the GPU, thus making the game run below 60FPS and allowing us to do more of a benchmark comparison. This misses the point that a game benchmark needs to be at meaningful settings; otherwise we can just go back to using 3DMarks."
I kinda disagree here... I would like to compaire severely stressed performance on real game engines.
Since many game engines are used in more than 1 game and the newer games often push the limits of the game engines.
Basically it's just an attempt to predict how future and more graphically intensive games base on the same engine would perform.
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mayankleoboy1 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
thanks for the benchmark. its surprising that no other tech site has yet released a RAGE benchmark, despite it being a major release.Malih - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Possibly some of them choose to wait a little longer until the issues are fixed with newer driver and game updates.B3an - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
If both of you actually read the article you'll see theres NO benchmarks here, due to current buggy drivers and the 60FPS cap. This is why no one has benchmarked the game yet.The game runs at a constant 60FPS on almost any remotely decent hardware. Considering how good the game looks, and with early drivers too, thats very impressive. Whats even more impressive is that the console versions looks almost exactly as good as the PC version and always run at 60FPS too. For consoles it's the best looking game around, easily. But John Carmack worked on the engine so i'm not that surprised, literally no one can match him.
I also love how the textures never repeat. Every single area is unique.
abzillah - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I beat the game and boarderlands is definitely a better game by a long shot. The game is very linear, their is basically not story, the character has no option but to following along. There are no video settings; the resolution cannot be changed, the quality of the video cannot be changed. Things get very repetitive. Playing the game on veteran, was easy to beat the enemy; no challenge at all. If anyone has not bought the game yet, wait for the price to drop, because this game is not worth more than $10.CLicKa - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - link
I agree. The game just seems to visit and revisit the same "hey that was a good job their buddy, you sure are a badass...but I got some more Shhhhh** for you to do." The dialogue is pretty mundane.I will say the artwork and time put into the environment, soundtrack etc is quite impressive and pulls you in which helps out the weak story and repetitiveness of the gameplay. I guess at the end of the day all shooters like this have a linear and less than interesting storyboard.
As far as running the game I am running a GTX 590 Classified and it is just beautiful. Runs like butter...I've had no driver issues thus. I'm using a Nvidia beta driver 285.38 that seems to be trouble free. I haven't noticed some of the aforementioned bugs or otherwise in-game.
Like "abzillah" said I do think "Borderlands" blows this effort away and had a truly unique skin and gameplay that set it apart from the competition.
Rage is worth getting but falls short of the hype. Then again, most games do.
Snowstorms - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I don't see the point outside of the scope of this game.Rage uses very unconventional render passes, I think they're the only engine that uses megatextures.The reason they have all these issues is because they have not followed standard rendering procedures.
kn00tcn - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
megatextures were used in ETQW & they turned out fine thereapparently brink & wolfenstein dont, & maybe not prey 2 either
one of the things i saw with people that had unplayable performance was that the game thought they had a 3mhz single core cpu, so the auto scaler of the game was calculating the wrong way... i say they should just have an option to ignore everything & run fixed settings (can be a console command, doesnt need to be in the menu)
Iketh - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
LOL what benchmark are you speaking of? Why on earth would you comment on an article you didn't read???? Drag yourself into the street and shoot yourself, thx.ImSpartacus - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Cool off, he probably didn't read the article before commenting.JonnyDough - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure that's the issue he's having with the poster... He commented without even reading the article. Negativity without any cause is just moronic.cactusdog - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
What is it with games these days? It seems like nearly every game, even highly anticipated games are broken, have features missing or have serious flaws when they're first released. Its like AMD and Nvidia dont give them any attention until they are released and people are complaining.Its like they dont care about PC gaming anymore.
Stas - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Try Hard Reset. PC exclusive of highest quality. Don't apply, if you don't enjoy a mix of Serious Sam, Painkiller, and Doom 3 :)cmdrdredd - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
It's not AMD or Nvidia at all...blame the devs and bean counters at the big publishers for pushing for console releases.AssBall - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
^^ Thisckryan - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Back when I was just knee-high to a bullfrog, I seem to remember having some technical difficulties with Ultima VII. In that case, it was certainly worth the aggravation. It's not a new phenomenon, but in fairness, games and the platforms they run on are much more complicated now. In between the time you spend with Microsoft for your Xbox version and Sony for your PS3 version, you have to find time to work with AMD/nVidia for your PC version. Technical issues are bad, but giving me a barely-warmed over console port is the worse sin. Sometimes the itchy rash of consolitis is minor, like some small UI issues (Press the Start Button!). Other times, it's deeply annoying, making me wonder if the developers have actually ever played a PC game before. Some games, like TES:Oblivion, have issues that can be corrected later by a dedicated mod community -- another important element for the identity of PC gaming.So while technical issues at launch for a game that's been in development for 3 to 5 years are inexcusable, there are some issues that are worse. Inane plots, bad mechanics, and me-too gameplay styles are making me question how committed some companies are to making PC gaming worthwhile (for consumers and therefore the industry as well). The PC is far and away the finest gaming platform, but some developers really need to try harder. Maybe PC gamers just expect more, but I say that we're a forgiving bunch -- but you have to bring your (triple) A-game.
JonnyDough - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
^^ THIS!Snowstorms - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
consoles have drastically influenced PC optimizationit has gotten so bad that I have started to check if the game is a PC exclusive, if it's not I'm already on my toes
brucek2 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
id claims the problems were mostly driver incompatibilities, which is a story we've all heard before.I wish publishers would include the drivers they qualified their games on as an optional part of their release. In an ideal situation the current and/or beta drivers already on your system would be fine and you wouldn't need them. But in the all too common screwed up situation, you could at least install those particular drivers for this particular game and know it was supposed to work.
taltamir - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Why is it nvidia/AMD's job to fix games?they do it, but they shouldn't need to. The drivers are out, they exist, they are speced.
And every single indie developer manages to make games that work without a driver update. Meanwhile major A titles ofter are released buggy and then nVidia and AMD scramble to hack it to so that the drivers identify the EXE and fix it. For example, Both companies gut the AA process included in most games and forces it to use a proper & modern AA solution for better quality and performance. (MSAA has been obsolete for years.)
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Most major AA titles have the developers in contact with NVIDIA and AMD, and they tell the GPU guys what stuff isn't working well and needs fixing (although anecdotally, I hear NVIDIA is much better at responding to requests). This is particularly true when a game does something "new", i.e. an up-to-date OpenGL release when we really haven't seen much from that arena in a while. I agree with the above post that says the devs should state what driver version they used for testing, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's covered by an NDA with the GPU companies.KikassAssassin - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
All Rage really needed to do was check your driver version, and if you're using an older driver than the game was designed for, pop up a message telling you to update your driver, with a link to download it from AMD/nvidia's website. They knew perfectly well that the game was broken on all but the latest drivers that were being released alongside the game, and few people were going to have those drivers installed when they tried playing the game for the first time, but they didn't do anything to let people know that beforehand.I'm a big fan of id and I'm enjoying Rage, but they really dropped the ball with this game's launch.
lkuzmanov - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
erm... it's not the chip makers responsibility to ensure a game runs - they certainly can and do help the devs, but QA should be part of the development / release cycle. in this context what's happening with Rage is just silly - your product either runs with the currently available drivers or you don't release it - it should be that simple."Until then, Rage remains an impressive technology demonstration and a game that some people will certainly enjoy; it’s just not a good benchmark for us right now."
the game would've qualified as "an impressive technology demonstration" had it come out on in a somewhat playable state. it didn't. oddly enough, however, the tone of most reviews I've seen remains positive.
JarredWalton - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
This totally depends on your hardware. It ran fine on my system prior to the patch, albeit with the beta NVIDIA drivers. I think it's mostly on lower spec machines and/or AMD GPUs that people are having problems.ProDigit - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Their conclusions are a story by itself!JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Not sure exactly what you're trying to say here... that I should have posted just a two paragraph blurb? Or that you like the long articles?Taft12 - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I think he's saying "I have a short attention span, doesn't everybody?"Iketh - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
you're a minorityltcommanderdata - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I was hoping you could comment on what version of OpenGL id Tech 5 is using? I'm under the impression that it's using OpenGL 2.1 + a ton of extensions. Do you think it would have been easier for AMD and nVidia to support if id had stuck to a more standard OpenGL implementation such as stock OpenGL 3.0?And any word on adding OpenCL support for GPGPU transcode? In earlier conference presentations, id said they were looking at a variety of options of including CUDA and OpenCL. I'm surprised they didn't go with OpenCL seeing it would have supported both CPUs and AMD and nVidia GPUs instead of requiring a separate codepath for nVidia GPUs and a CPU codepath for everything else. Certainly now that OpenGL 1.1 drivers are available for AMD CPUs and GPUs, nVidia GPUs, and Intel CPUs and soon Ivy Bridge, now is definitely the time for the first OpenCL accelerated game.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
The context that Rage creates is an OpenGL 3.2 context. But I could not tell you off of the top of my head what they're using from OpenGL 3.x, but OpenGL is nebulous in general like that. Given that they're using a 3.2 context, I wouldn't be too worried about what specific features they are or are not using. It's not like OpenGL 4.x where there are specific headliner features (e.g. tessellation) that people are familiar with.As for OpenCL, the last thing I heard was the famous post a couple of weeks ago about CUDA, which noted that OpenCL was a performance issue. There hasn't been any news on that.to which I'm aware of.
swaaye - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
On Beyond3D in the PC Gaming forum, NV's Evan Hart (engineer behind most of the GPU transcoding) stopped by and mentioned that OpenCL was tested perhaps years ago on older hardware and it performed poorly at the time. Apparently it was not further explored. I'm not sure which company lacked the motivation to go further with it.Rukur - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I will not ever again buy a game for my PC that also runs on console junk.The Games are crap.
UI is crap.
Game questions only have 4 possible answers in a diamond pattern.
Utter junk.
Steve McQueen - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
a better path is just to wait 2 years and see if a modding community has formed around a game. If it has, chances are good that it is a decent game and you will be able to amp up the experience with content from from people who just love gaming [and boobies, ;) ].The0ne - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Yep, it's a good rule of the thumb! My latest encounter was my beloved Dungeon Siege 3 game. The port was so horrendous it got me so upset I spent hours writing up a FAQ to help others perform basic functions like properly move around.My nephews refuse to play an FPS games on their consoles and prefer them on the PC. Other games such as fighting and sports they play on the consoles. MMO is another no no on the consoles.
CrystalBay - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Baked Lighting , Static skybox ,WTH is this shit ? Who is Carmak ? iD?Just wait for the suckers to buy Skyrim and get this ,"The New Creation Engine" cough Gamebyro. FU ZeniMax..
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
It's tough to say, as they look different. As a game, Crysis 2 certainly has a better story, but I haven't quite finished it yet. I'm not sure why, but Rage got me wanting to see the conclusion, and I ended up disappointed but I still finished. Crysis 2, I was playing and then paused and got distracted by something else, but I'm about 80% finished and need to go back. I'm more interested in wrapping up Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though, so Crysis 2 is on the backburner until then. Oh, and DXHR looks like crap compared to Rage and Crysis 2, but I like it more as a game. Not sure if that says more about me or the games, though.Omega215D - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Deus Ex: HR was supposed to be graphically superior but quite a few things got cut from the finalized game due to limited resources and wanting to make the game accessible to more configs. Or so the story goes.Despite the graphics I found the game very fun and addicting, much to the point where I'm on a 3rd play through to see how much stuff I can find. Then I will be going back to the original Deus Ex to follow the sequence of the story and then onto Deus Ex: IW (a game known to be crippled by console requirements). It's like an interactive novel I can't put down.
Crysis 2 was pretty interesting but I got tired of it soon after. Been playing BC2 and Black Ops multiplayer for my FPS kicks. I was about to give Rage a try until I heard about the bugs.
Proxy711 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I've only ever returned 2 games in my entire gaming life, I'm 25 years old. Even dead island didn't get returned, and that's really saying something.The two? Unlimited Saga and RAGE.
Rage was a pain in the ass to get running right even with the upgraded drivers and config tweaks. Combine that with id pretty much saying we don't care about PC gamers and I quickly got a steam refund.
Rage has so many PC options missing its crazy. No SLI or crossfire support, baked lighting, the absence of any user config (until a patch that added a few more), 60FPS max.
Such a disappointment. id and carmak are dead to me.
RenderB - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
On a personal level I partly disagree with the borderlands comparison. That game has more humor, limited freedom, and even some exploring. (Like those weapon caches that are semi outside the map.) It also has decent coop. The Rage npcs say more up front, where as the ones in borderlands will coment during story missions via echo.Rage feels very linear, and seems to constantly build up to something that never happens. (That last level is a major anti climax.)
I did have to do some tinkering before it would run, disabling ati ai got it working.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I'm not saying the games are the same, but they feel very similar. As I noted in the conclusion, Rage makes me want to go replay Borderlands to see how it actually compares. I have a feeling I'll prefer Borderlands, if only for the semi-open world. Actually, I was just reading about Borderlands 2 in PC Gamer, which could be a better comparison if it can come out within a few months.Aikouka - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Borderlands 2 won't be out until 2012... unfortunately. :(Every time I look at my Steam games list, I always kind of wonder how I spent so much time playing Borderlands (~220 hours). The game is oddly addicting for those that love dungeon crawlers or collecting loot, but I think anyone that's played it will admit that there really isn't much of a story. The game does have some pretty good dark humor though, and you may find that enjoyable.
If you also prefer getting technical about things, there's a lot of "behind the scenes" technical stuff that you can learn that will give you a better understanding of Borderlands. For example, how exactly the elemental guns work or what defines a shield's stats. I ended up looking a lot of this up, and now I can look at a model of a shield on the ground and tell if it's good or not.
If that's not enough to impress the ladies, I don't know what is! ;)
SSIV - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
This is my first post on Anandtech ever. I've been a reader for a long time, but never felt the necessity to resort to posting prior to this moment.So, mostly due to rageConfig.cfg misinformation on the internet, the article's verdict of RAGE as a benchmarking tool is void.
Firstly, the steam forums config doesn't do anything, if you try changing some of the environment variables written in it from the in-game console you'll notice no change. There's only a few variables worth changing. The rest is locked.
Secondly, the variables worth changing are mentioned on nvidia's website:
http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock...
Concerning the constant-fps/variable-quality statement you'll notice that this can be easily changed to constant-quality (if you read the above link's content). Hi-res textures are enabled once you change a few variables to 16384 (read link for details).
For heavy benchmarking I'd recommend using this config:
jobs_numThreads 12 // makes big difference on AMD X6 1055T
vt_maxPPF 128 // max is 128
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 16384
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 16384
vt_pageimagesizeunique 16384
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 16384
vt_restart
r_multiSamples 32
vt_maxaniso 4 // 0-16 (32?)
image_anisotropy 4 // same
CUDA transcode is not included in config because it can be changed on-demand under video options. Whereas settings such as r_multiSamples 32 cannot be set from menu (16 is highest).
Please revise the benchmarking verdict, because it doesn't do the game justice.
Also, it'd make Anandtech the first site to make a real benchmark of RAGE.
I'd like to see this happen :)
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
@Jarred WaltonPlease do take a look at this, as the images posted there show a very noticeable improvement in texture quality.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
SSIV, you're correct that most of the variables in that config I linked didn't do anything, which is why I didn't test with them for most of the time. I ran some screenshot comparisons, shrugged, and moved on. And you might be surprised to hear that I actually already read that whole article before you every posted; I just never tried forcing the 16K textures (as the article itself states you "might" see an improvement). Anyway, I'll check 16K textures, but let me clarify a few things.1) Setting Texture Cache to "Large" gets to very nearly the same quality as the forced 8K textures.
2) CUDA transcode was tested separately, and has no apparent impact on performance for my systems.
3) Forcing constant quality is fine, but that doesn't do anything for the 60FPS frame rate cap...
4) ...unless you force at least 16xAA, and possibly 32xAA. (I tried 32xAA once before and the game crashed, but perhaps that was a bad config file.)
Even if you can get below the 60FPS frame rate cap, however, that does not make a game a good benchmark. Testing at silly levels of detail to try to get below the frame rate cap is not useful, especially if many of the changes that will cut the frame rate down far enough result in negligible (or worse) image quality.
Thanks for the input, but unless I'm sorely mistaken this CFG file hacking still won't make Rage into a useful benchmark. Anyway, I'll investigate a few more things and add an addendum, based on what I discover.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Addendum: 16k textures do absolutely nothing for quality. What's more, you really start to run into other issues. Specifically:1) Using a GTX 580 with 12GB of system RAM, 16k forced textures (using your above list of custom settings) causes every level to load super slow -- you can see the low-res textures, frame rate is at 1-2 FPS, and it takes 5 to 20 seconds (sometimes longer) for a level to finish loading. This is of course assuming nothing crashes, which in my limited experience over the past 30 minutes is quite common.
2) 16k textures with 8xAA enabled crashes at 2560x1600, so I had to drop to 4xAA to even get levels to attempt to load (though 1080p 8xAA works okay).
3) Even with 16k textures, the difference compared to 8k screenshots is virtually zero. Without running an image diff, I couldn't tell which looks better, but even the file sizes are nearly equal
4) Finally, even if we get rid of the 16k textures idea, 16xAA looks worse than 4xAA and 8xAA, because everything becomes overly blurred, and 32xAA looks downright awful. "Hooray! No jaggies! Boo! No detail!"
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Also FYI, there are now two paragraphs and a final image gallery on page 3 discussing the above.SSIV - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
I'm aghast at the vigor of your response! Thank you for investigating and researching this Jarred Walton. With things looking as they are now I can see that not much else can be done about the benchmark verdict.What >8xAA settings do to the game sounds worrysome however. I assume id will address this sooner or later.
Because the textures load iteratively, they're blurry at first. Under heavy load the engine might only have enough time to AA the first first texture layer (might be a realtime constraint). But this is just my hypothesis, which shouldn't be true because it implies some sort of texture iteration load block.
16k has small differences, mostly on road signs and bump mapped cement blocks. But like you said, it's not a significant improvement compared to 8k.
Thank you for your effort and making an insightful review!
SSIV - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
A 32-bit game can only allocate as much memory as 32 bits permits, which lands around 3072MiB. So unless RAGE uses PAE, which diminishes overall ram performance, your 12GiB of ram will never be utilized.Having said that, the sentence beginning with "Using a GTX 580 with 12GB of system RAM" is slightly disappointing.
Again, great review.
JonnyDough - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Maybe not, but his link sure did help show me what Rage can really look like. Wow! Those textures make the game look sooo much better! I'm sure an old console can't produce that clarity!SSIV - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Here's some more texture comparisons if you're interested:http://forums.steamgames.com/forums/showpost.php?p...
Biggest difference between 8k & 16k are signs and jagged peaks of blocks/rocks. Goes unnoticed once motion blur kicks in.
As a side note, I hope a game that'll utilize the dynamic lighting part of this game engine will appear soon. That'll be an interesting add to the Tech 5 stew.
JarredWalton - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I think these images show what I hinted at above: depending on your system and settings, if you go beyond a certain point in "quality" you may end up with inconsistent overall quality. 2560x1600 with 4xAA and 16k textures certainly did it for my GTX 580, and 1920x1080 at 8xAA seemed to do it as well. Some of the linked images show definite improvements, but interestingly there's at least one shot (Img 2) where the 8k texturing isn't consistently better than the 4k texturing -- two of the building walls as well as the distant mountains look like 1k textures or something.If you have enough VRAM, 16k textures with 8xAA looks like the best you'll get, provided you only run at 1080p or lower resolution (or at least not 2560x1600/2560x1440). On my system, however, 16k causes problems far too often for me to recommend it. I tried binding a key to switch between 16k and 8k texture cache, and most of the time when I try switching to 16k the game crashes. I'd be curious to hear what hardware others are using (and what drivers) where 16k is stable at 2560x1600.
Stuka87 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Ok, I realize this is just a pet peeve, but on page two there is this line.John Carmack has stated that all of the uncompressed textures in Rage occupy around 1TB of space, so obviously that’s not something they could ship/stream to customers, as even with a 6:1 compression ration they’d still be looking at 170GB of textures.
Ration should be Ratio. Unless of course it is in fact compressed food :)
But great article otherwise. And maybe I missed it, but did you go into texture pop-in at all? It seems storage speed is a major issue in this game.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Thanks... sorry for the typo. I know the word is "ratio", but when I'm typing fast for some reason I often end up with "ration". I think it's just muscle memory from all the other words ending in "tion".Stuka87 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Oh I know, its very easy to do :)nyran125 - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
when you actually play the game, peopl eare getting mroe than just little texture pop ups, they arew getting massive driver conflicts from AMD. Like big ugly strange low res texture blocks show up all over the road in front of you, or on the hills or on objects, especially on mid range systems like AMD 6870's, its more noticable.Purely an AMD driver is problem. It would be nice if GPU companies were encouraged before major games like RAGE are released to stores, to just maybe have someone pop into id software jsut to make sure if any dirver updates need to be done. Or maybe more team work between game developer and hardware manufactorers.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
I need to test on lower end AMD hardware, but unfortunately the only hardware I have other than 5870/6950 is mobile hardware, and both laptops with 6630M GPUs will not take the reference AMD drivers. Long-term, I'm sure it will all get worked out, but of course that doesn't help if you have a Sony laptop that won't accept non-Sony driver updates. :-\RenderB - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Are you running the 11.10 preview 2 drivers? Those made things far worse on my HD6870.Actually those drivers stop working, and then do a recover whenever I logged into windows. Was even giving me trouble with the intro vid.
Reverting back to 11.9, and using radeonpro to run this game without ati AI more or less fixed my issues with the game.
Frenetic Pony - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
Graphics programming enthusiast, checking in!This is due to the engine itself, or rather just the size of the game you have to download and limits of the 360 being on a dvd.
The textures the engine uses can all be utterly unique (and essentially are in RAGE thanks to precalculated lighting for every last environment pixel). They can also be unlimited in texture size, but because of the way technical mumbo jumbo this takes up a ton of disc space. So they limited it because they wanted to put it out on the 360.
But the good news is that a patch is on the way that should clear up the textures some on the pc. That and Carmack has expressed a desire to see what the game looked like when turned up to 11, and release that to the pc public. So presumably there will be some taste of an ultra sharp co-op level or something coming and we can see what Id-tech 5 will be able to do without dinky little disc space requirements holding it back.
ENUF - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
I have beat RAGE on the normal setting; however am having a b!tch of a time on nightmare. I was able to beat Borderlands + all the DLC on the hardest setting. I love both games; I like Borderlands more; however RAGE is tougher to me. Excellent graphics on both games too. I can't wait for more patches to come down the pipe and more DLC for RAGE. Another excellent game by ID.Akv - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
It is always sad for me to see that kind of video games, which I consider esthetically appalling, intellectually illiterate and psychologically gloomy.You might argue it is what teenagers are nowadays, and there is a huge demand for ugly, stupid and gloomy games. However, I don't get used to seeing adults praise that sort of things.
Revdarian - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
About the technology. I do not think that MegaTexture is quite nice, as i feel that it's pro (non repeating textures) is overshadowed deeply by it's cons (severely HDD inefficient for memory storage, and the problems it generates when generating//editting levels), so yeah, i am personally not impressed on that very specific regard.Also you guys didn't seem to notice the total lack of dynamic lights, and how they had to butcher the texture in any dark area...
I understand your opinion and respect it, but i can't share it. Cheers!
Carlos_ - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I also feel very disappointed with the Megatexture techonology. In my PC, I have a lot of texture popping and the game is not very pretty. It's fluid, but I have lots of slowdowns. It stops for a moment every 20 seconds or so.If I compare it with, for example, Crysis 1 it's considerably uglier and less smooth and the game pauses to load new levels quite often (every time you enter a new zone).
Rage is the worse id game I have ever seen, and I play their games since the Commander Keen times.
I think that this is be the last game I will buy from them.
Revdarian - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Yeah, but even trying to "fix" it by making it keep a bigger amount of textures actually in memory//streaming some of it beforehand, the basis of the engine is flawed in my humble opinion.You see, if you want dynamic lightning, then you will have to keep the textures at a higher level, thus achieving a lesser compression than they did.
And there is almost no proper way to add interactive objects to the levels by the very nature of it.
On top of that it also forces level designers to work constantly with the graphic artists, as every little design change has to be run again, and the base texture modified by hand and recompressed.
So, again, 21GB for just roughly 10hours of gameplay and regular to bad texture quality, how much would it be for a decent lenght and higher quality?... 40GB? 50?
Honestly i feel that developers would do better modifying idTech4 (which supported MegaTexture but didn't seem to be entirely focused on it), versus idTech5.
Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - link
It's a fantastic technology all around! At least, once the dvd9 limits of the 360 can be eliminated. Doom 4, which will be a smaller area on even more dvds, should look utterly fantastic and not blurry at all.Plus it's an incredible win from the standpoint of artists using it. No more worrying about texture size, or cramming it into memory, or you can't put this texture here, or etc.
pyrocro - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Found this command "vt_visualbenchmark" here->http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1640248&...not sure if anyone discovered/knew this before but adding the common code line terminator ";" after a command allows you to place another command on that same line. for example
vt_restart; vt_visualbenchmark 20
combining these 2 commands seems to produce consistent benchmarks results for a given area and they are very different from the vt_benchmark results. I have only tested this for about 5 mins and it seems to be a useful indicator for perfomance.
aguilpa1 - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I played Borderlands and Fallout NV and enjoyed both for different reasons. I guess I'm just a post apocalyptic kind of guy. Compared to the older two Rage was down right beautiful in some parts and I couldn't help but feel awed by the surroundings.However, it was not a game designed for my computer like mine, or gamers like me who use, a 3 - monitor (Alienware 23", 120hz), 3.8Ghz OC'ed i7 and GTX 590 type of system. Whenever I tried to run on three screen mode at full resolution, all I got was tons of texture flashing and eventually a crash with crappy performance. No matter how many settings and custom .cfg's I could find.
This game was built for a console, plain and simple. A typical sellout game that has no roots to its past nor the community that help support it. It ran beautifully at 1920x1080, big deal. Both Borderlands and Fallout NV run beautifully at 5760x1080 without missing a beat and without any fancy megatextures.
Whatever id.
JarredWalton - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I'm guessing you'll need to wait a month or two to get three screen support working well. It's going to be mostly driver fixes/updates to enable Rage to run on three displays. Honestly, I'm surprised you haven't had more issues doing triple-head with recent releases, as that's about as bleeding-edge as you can get.mauler1973 - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
I don't know about anyone else, But I want to see more games with great storylines!Belard - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Yeah, like Left4Dead... And UT 3.Mike89 - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
There were remarks in this article comparing Rage with Borderlands. I see no comparison whatsoever and can't see how the reviewer came up with that. Borderlands is not even in the same ballpark as Rage. Borderlands should have been called Cartoonlands.JarredWalton - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
Post apocalyptic world with mainly a desert environment? Check.Vehicles to drive? Check.
NPCs and/or missions that feel hollow? Check.
Obviously the stories are different, and the gaming engines are completely different, but for someone to say you see no comparison whatsoever? You're apparently thinking that I was comparing the engines and rendering as opposed to the setting. That I'm talking about the setting should be clear from the context.
Valitri - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
After reading threw the article, I have to say I am impressed with the title of the article. Bravo!On another note, I absolutely love post apocolyptic type games (Borderlands and Fallout), and after reading this it really makes me what to pick it up. However, I am in the middle of Deus Ex: HR, trying to weed off my WoW addiction, and don't mind waiting for better drivers for my 6970. So I will be picking this title up soon, thanks for the opinions and generally nice article to read.
aguilpa1 - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Michael is this u? This post sounds awful familiar.JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Who is "Michael"?Valitri - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - link
Sorry to dissapoint, my name is not Michael. I haven't ever posted on this site before, just been reading it for 4 or 5 years.T2k - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
...I guess once you suck at making games you will always suck at making games, huh?cactusdog - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
You cant be serious, sure RAGE has issues but ID are pioneers of computer gaming. Quake, Doom and Wolfenstein are classics.Theres so much disrespect from gamers....
deV14nt - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
It's because many of them weren't even born when those games came out. They really have no idea.Regardless, I think id took a wrong turn some time around id Tech 4. Q3 engine games were the smoothest twitch FPS games. Best gaming tournaments around then too.
HangFire - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
I've been thinking about this for a few days. Obviously doing screen captures and visually comparing texture resolution is no way to go about benchmarking.To do benchmarking properly with this engine, you'll need the cooperation of id, to make available some variables for you. Those variables would record how hard the de-rez system is working.
If you could record how much and how long the engine is forced to de-rez, you could put together some very understandable graphs. One in realtime showing how much de-rez as you play through a level, when things get busy on a slow machine you'll see a lot of de-rez. Another graph showing how much time spent at less than 100% resolution, average de-rez, etc.
The problem with this approach is that (at the moment) no other game or engine is available to compare to. It would allow you to compare different hardware.
meatfestival - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
The renderer was rewritten. It uses DX9 (in single player)The multiplayer uses OpenGL, it's based on the Quake Wars version of the engine.
NT78stonewobble - Saturday, November 12, 2011 - link
"A second suggestion was that we force 16xAA to improve quality and put more of a load on the GPU, thus making the game run below 60FPS and allowing us to do more of a benchmark comparison. This misses the point that a game benchmark needs to be at meaningful settings; otherwise we can just go back to using 3DMarks."I kinda disagree here... I would like to compaire severely stressed performance on real game engines.
Since many game engines are used in more than 1 game and the newer games often push the limits of the game engines.
Basically it's just an attempt to predict how future and more graphically intensive games base on the same engine would perform.