Rage PC patch released; launch problems 'out of our control'
A patch for Rage on PC was issued over the weekend, fixing up a few bugs and adding new options. id's John Carmack has also spoken on the driver issues that saw "half of our PC customers" get "a product that basically didn't work."
Rage got off to a slightly rocky start on PC, but things are turning around with new drivers from graphics manufacturers and a new patch issued by developer id Software over the weekend. id has also explained a little of why the PC version was in such a state.
Saturday's patch brought changes including crash fixes, the ability to change the FOV from Rage's launch options, and a few new graphics settings to fiddle with in the menus.
According to Rage creative director Tim Willits, a lot of the PC problems stem from wonky graphics card drivers. "We have had video driver issues that have caused problems and frustrations with our PC fans. Everyone at id Software is very upset by these issues which are mostly out of our control," he told Kotaku.
id technical wizard John Carmack was less restrained, describing the launch driver issues as "a real cluster !@#$." (That's secret code for a naughty word.) While id and AMD had worked together before launch, with id making "significant internal changes" to work best with AMD tech, it all went to pot.
"We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work," Carmack said.
Carmack also again explained why consoles were the lead platforms, not PC.
"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," he said. "We chose the latter."
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack explained. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version."
"A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
Anyway, here's exactly what changed in Saturday's PC patch:
- Implemented workaround for AMD driver crash right after intro cinematic on Win 7 32-bit systems.
- Disabled UBOs because they are causing animation issues with AMD drivers.
- Don't allow swap-tear to be enabled on AMD while the extension is not exposed because it may crash.
- Support for new video settings: "texture cache", "vsync" and "anisotropic filter"
- Automatically adjust vt_maxPPF based on the number of available cores.
- Improved performance for SLI cards when GPU transcode is enabled.
- Fix for GPU Transcoding option being disabled after exiting gameplay.
- Added safe mode to restore video settings to default values.
- Allow g_fov to be changed from the RAGE launch options in Steam.
- Server now forwards text chat from clients to all other clients while in-game.
Do check out the full patch notes for solutions to a number of known issues, too.
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Shacknews
replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Rage PC patch released; launch problems 'out of our control'.
A patch for Rage on PC was issued over the weekend, fixing up a few bugs and adding new options. id's John Carmack has also spoken on the driver issues that saw "half of our PC customers" get "a product that basically didn't work."-
I was on the side that had no issues at all getting this game up and running. The guns feel great, the driving is fun and controls are not at all frustrating, and the character animations are good.
If up-close textures had high resolution versions, I would have no reservations saying Rage is the best looking game to date ever to be released. But, with the it's two headed monster that is amazing level of detail for distances, and up close worse-than-2003 instances, I'm left hoping for a texture pack in the future before fully playing through this game.-
Try this http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2156408
And if the game vsync with the new patch doesnt work just add
seta r_swapInterval 1
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"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," he said. "We chose the latter."
No, you chose the third option.
That is, design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements, without giving a !@#$ (secret code again XD) about te game optimization or checking if it at least works.
Because not having options to change the graphics options, no vsync option, terrible popping, and have to use a custom .cfg to fix those and many more things that must have already been there if you didnt think abut the pc version as a crappy port without any effort put on it.
Ah of course.... and then the all the problems are magically produced because of the drivers......
This basically proves it : "We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems."
If you have to say that, clearly someone at ID isn't doing its job.
The game is good when you have done all the work that devs should have done before release. Its fun to play, but its clearly not woth buying as of today.
Better wait for a huge discount, because thats what they deserve, they do half of the work so we pay them half of the price.-
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Are you insinuating that there haven't already been massive improvements made with the most recent graphics driver releases? Hell, the recent driver updates have made the difference of the game being playable at all for a lot of people who had issues at launch.
No dev is perfect, and no new game gets released without a patch somewhere down the line. I think its commendable that id has acted so quickly to patch in additional graphics menu options (which are not necessary, but were desired by lots of pc customers) and additional tweaks, and I'm sure there will be more patches after this one. It means that they practice excellent post-release support, IMO.-
Saying that graphics menu options are not necessary already says a lot. You have very low standards for games.
And its even more necessary in this game, because it was supposed (yea, in their (id) dream world) that the game auto tuned the graphics, when it has been proved that its a huge lie.
Having to create and modify a cfg file for it to run right and with the correct quality its is a another proof that its necessary, and thhat they didnt do its job right.
Caring about drivers POST launch, instead PRE launch is a huge mistake, and it shows that someone at id didnt do its work.
Drivers made a difference, but without the patch in THEIR CODE to add the graphics options and vsync, we will still have crappy graphics / textures and lots of crashes. So ID blaming the drivers for all of their problems was just an easy evasive move.
And as you said, no dev is perfect, but they left too many things undone, but those were no little things, and thats the real problem.
They acted fast... yea... in something that it must have been done pre launch.
Calling this a good post release support, is like buying a car, then after buying it and while driving it you discover that the brakes don't work, and then they come and fix the brakes when you are stamped on a lamp post. Hey and you even praise them after....
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vsync isn't supposed to stay on all the time for most people--that's what smart vsync is. It hits vsync if it can and it tears if it misses so you don't drop to 30 hz. Then they make changes to how much work they're performing per frame to make sure you get back to 60 hz.
And if you don't have drivers (it requires new driver support) that support smart vsync, you instead get vsync off.
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I think you might want to check the Steam support forums... still a lot of people with a lot of problems (82 pages at this point on the main thread). I personally can now move in the world (huge improvement!) but now I'm having severe texture pop-in and artifacting. Valve has offered me a refund, but I am still trying to get it to work...
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Have you tried turning off anti-aliasing and/or using the force texture size options from this thread under "Blurry Textures and Texture Popping"?
http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1236250-rage-support/ -
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LOL
"id technical wizard John Carmack was less restrained, describing the launch driver issues as "a real cluster !@#$." (That's secret code for a naughty word.) While id and AMD had worked together before launch, with id making "significant internal changes" to work best with AMD tech, it all went to pot." -
This is a start; the UI screwups are fully IN their control. I understand if it'll take time to redesign the UI to work for PC gamers who don't have their hand hovering over the Enter key all the time (more PC FPS game developers should develop for WASD and mouse, and have menu keys under those keys, NOT "press Enter" or "move the mouse pointer to this tiny icon and click with the left mouse button").
It's sad that I had to feed this string into the Steam launch options before the first time I started the game to get a better experience:
+com_skipIntroVideo 1 +com_allowconsole 1 +cvaradd g_fov 20 +image_usecompression 0 +m_smooth 0
Thank you for allowing the option, and the console, Id, but you guys don't seem to have any hardcore PC FPS gamers left in your ranks. Those options all should have had toggle options in the menu. Valve still does it for the Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead series, and they don't show a stupid "Achievements are disabled" nag screen for changing these things.
Maybe next patch. I really like Rage, but I feel like I'm going to keep saying "maybe next patch" for the next year or so.-
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BTW image compression is the pixel format on the GPU. It will not make any difference image quality wise : what it will do is increase the chance for texture pop-in/out due to the same amount of textures taking more memory
Also, m_smooth 0 does nothing in rage. it will reset to 1. it has to be 1+ . (it's how many frames to use for averaging mouse input. You need at least 1 frame) -
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What? Link to guide?
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Nvidia-only thing.
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I'm on the verge of buying this for my bluray player, I mean PS3. Even with the patches, driver updates, and various fixes, half the textures in the first room look great, and the other half look like blurry blobs, and when I step out into the wasteland, it looks like a bad N64 game with god draw distance.
Then I quit and try some more fixes, and have it do the same thing. That's my experience so far with rage. -
I think there would have been a ton less backlash if ID had just said upfront that the current release versions of video card drivers would not work and that video card manufacturers are working to fix it.
Instead, they released it and everyone had shit performance with no indication of why. Then later ID says "Oh, yeah, we knew that was going to happen. We're good now though, right?" -
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Probably because 90% of the audience is going to buy it for their 360 or PS3. And that the resources it would have taken to put out a test version on PC wouldn't have been worth spending, it's not like you can just stick rage.exe and e1m1.bsp in a zip file and throw it on the internet. And that the drivers required to run the game properly weren't publicly available.
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I am totally in love with the game now that it's running right. The only thing I'd like to see is support for 120hz, but I'm not holding my breath. It's awesome as-is.
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Now that it's mostly fixed... the game is actually very boring and presents no challenge what so ever. I'm playing on hard and 3 hours into the game and haven't even came close to dieing. All the enemies can be defeated with some thing as simple as a circle strafe and most of the time i just use my fists to defeat all of the enemies. Also there is too much talking and not enough shooting going on!
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I gotta say I'm loving this game so far. I was lucky enough to have downloaded the beta nvidia driver for Battlefield 3 Beta, so I was up and running right away. The only issue I had was the screen tearing, which was irritating until I used the nvidia control panel to force vsync to on for rage.exe. Now, it's running like a ferarri and is twice as pretty.
Why doesn't Battlefield 3 run this smooth?!-
Technically it works and looks great. Creatively its lacking and isn't worth the $60 asking price, it's simply missing content and I doubt they'll make up for it even with doc.
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"John Carmack: Developing RAGE for consoles was a big mistake, future titles will put priority on PC hardware"
Source: http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760
^^ from over a year ago. Alice fails to mention the whole story about the console being the lead and how that was a big mistake, as we all see by the inferior product we all paid $60 for.-
"Developing RAGE for consoles was a big mistake, but that doesn't mean we won't milk PC users dry with bugs and UI screwups! I mean why shouldn't PC users press 2 buttons to use a bound action on a 101 key keyboard! LOL I crack myself up, show me the money."
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I was one of the lucky people that have an nVidia card and had the BF3 beta drivers installed when I first fired up Rage. I havent had any issues with teh game at all and honestly I think it is a great game. I am a little disturbed by the fact that carmack (once one of the biggest pc supporters) is now saying that PC are no longer the lead platform, but I can understand. Consoles make a lot more money than pc do, but consoles gamers also pay more for their games :)
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I wonder if graphics drivers should work the way the MS VC++ redistributable libraries do. It looks like each application installs a version of this thing that its developed to be compatible with (I have 15 of them installed, different versions, at the same time). This way a game would install with a build of the graphics drivers that it works best with and all games would use their own versions. Patches for the games would update these drivers as needed. This would avoid the whole need for beta drivers with optimizations for speciifc games that make other games break. Hope someone from id or Nvidia or AMD reads this and comments.
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