RAGE

[Executor32]

So yeah, the PC port kind of sucks. No graphics options except resolution, AA, brightness, and a 'GPU Transcode' option that apparently offloads texture loading to the GPU using CUDA (NVIDIA only, obviously). Not that that last option matters, since there's still noticeable pop-in when you so much as turn around. Kind of like UE3 games often are, except instead of happening on occasions few and far between (usually after a level transition or loading a savegame), it happens every goddamn time you move the mouse. It's nowhere near as bad in my case as most videos I've seen of the issue, but it's still annoying as hell. That said, the game does look pretty nice, I guess, at least from afar. Up close, though, most textures look like they could be from CoD (the original, that is). Makes me wonder what constitutes the bulk of the 20GB install, because that sure as fuck isn't it. That said, I like the game's take on the whole post-apocalyptic thing:
Spoiler

Rather than placing the game after a nuclear holocaust like every other game in the genre, the game takes place 106 years after a giant-as-fuck asteroid slams into Earth. Evidently, it was too much for Harry Stamper and his posse to handle.

Also, I'm not sure but I think the first friendly you meet is played by John Goodman, which is cool because John Goodman makes anything better. It almost makes up for the glaring problems I mentioned. Almost.

[Havok]

[quote="Executor32"Spoiler

Rather than placing the game after a nuclear holocaust like every other game in the genre, the game takes place 106 years after a giant-as-fuck asteroid slams into Earth. Evidently, it was too much for Harry Stamper and his posse to handle.

[/quote]
BULLSHIT!

[Stark]

Why should anyone who's played any of the million other punks-in-desert-drive-cars-while-being-insane games care about Rage? I have never been able to work up any give a shit about the game at all.

Ps the install is 20gb because id suck balls and haven't made a good game in 20 years.

[Executor32]

Turns out I was wrong, the textures do in fact make up just over half the install. Hard to tell, when they look like this:


Click to enlarge

You guys thought I was joking when I said they could be out of the original Call of Duty, didn't you? This is on an i7-2600k @ 4.3 GHz with 16 GB RAM and a 1 GB GeForce 560 Ti, hardly a slouch in the performance department. Meh, at least the framerate is butter-smooth even with 16x AA, I guess.

EDIT: The only reason I preordered it was because Steam had that whole 'preorder RAGE and/or Skyrim and get a discount on the Quakecon Pack' deal going on a couple months ago, and I had an excess of money so I figured what the hell. Aside from the graphics and other things I mentioned, I actually like the game thus far. I wish I hadn't spent 60 bucks on the damn thing, but whatever.

[Vympel]

You can't be serious? That's what Rage looks like? It looks like a fried fart.

EDIT:

http://gaming.icrontic.com/article/why- ... g-to-suck/

A year old article, calls it perfectly, judging from that screenshot.

[Executor32]

I reposted my posts here on another forum, and look what my first reply is:

The texture files are huge not because they're super high-quality but because they don't recycle them. Almost every inch of the game has been uniquely textured.

Clearly you need to inform yourself better on what is Megatexture and what does it do.

I don't know if there's supposed to be a at the end there or not.

Like I said there, I'd rather have really nice looking recycled textures than unique textures that look like dogshit.

[Feil]

I'm sad. I was looking forward to a modernized Quake IV to run and gun around in.

Well, maybe after you guys who paid 60 dollars have beta-tested the game for a few months for them, they'll patch it into something worth playing.

I wonder if the texture horrors are a result of the game trying to dynamically scale to keep your framerate up at the expense of looking like Call of Duty. Which would be amusing and sad, because even if I have to set all other settings down, textures are the one thing I insist on always keeping at maximum level.

[Executor32]

If it was dynamically scaling to keep framerate up, logically turning off AA and/or lowering the resolution should make it scale the textures higher, right? Nope, they still look like shit. The game looks gorgeous when everything in the frame is far away, I'll give it that. Up close, it all looks like the screen I posted, except for the characters, they look as good as most games nowadays. Vympel's article called it spot on.

[Anacronian]

Found this funny..and sad.

[DaveJB]

I get the feeling that id tried to go with the "have low-res textures to keep the install size down, then make them look better with shaders" approach that many developers use, but screwed up the implementation horribly. Either that or they designed the game with only 720p resolution in mind, and didn't give a shit about PC users who would try to run it at higher resolutions (I shudder to think what the game would look like at 2560x1440).

[Stark]

Man maybe YOU should look up megatexture.

Frankly, that article's console-bashing is pretty funny. The game is 20gb. If id suck too bad to fit quality textures in there - and they do - that's not Sony's fault. What'd be a REAL laugh is comparing the ~14gb console screenshots to PC screenshots, to highlight the awful quality of the raw art assets.

If only id made actual scalable, saleable engines instead of tech demos they use to make a really generic game?

[Alyeska]

Did some reading on this over at Ars Technica. Apparently the way the game works, just trying to take vidoes of it eats into the processing ability of the game and actually degrades the graphics. Vidoes of the game are going to be lower quality than the game itself. Ars made a joke about Heisenberg because of that.

[Executor32]

No, the way the game works, it looks like shit no matter what you do. You can close all other running programs, you can turn off AA, you can lower the resolution, and the textures will still be blurry and full of artifacts, and the texture pop-in will still happen every damn time you move the mouse. The PS3 version has the same problems, and even though from what I've seen the 360 doesn't have visible pop-in, it still has the same shitty low-res textures. As far as I'm concerned, this whole megatexture thing is a failed experiment.

[Stark]

The thing is the MEGATEXTURE is probably built up from regular textures of high quality. At some point they must have decided 'lower the quality on this stuff' for whatever reason, possibly memory or streaming concerns. It's just a laugh they apparently didn't include higher-quality version for PC.

[Ford Prefect]

I keep hearing shit like 'lala the textures look like ass' and 'zomg so much popping all over the place'. But I just watched a random video on YouTube and it looked fine. Great even, though I mean it was kind of brown. I mean that article Vympel posted is all 'check out how shit this wall looks', but maybe I'm just not enough of a sperglord to understand what the fuck that guy is on about. Honestly at the end of the day I think the funniest thing is the Ars reviewer not realising that he's in a tutorial.

[Stark]

But but but the nose hair rendering! the art is only an issue because it's clearly so inefficient.

It's not like having an awful skybox really impacts the game - it's just lame for a cutting-edge engine from 'brilliant' Mr Carmack.

[Ford Prefect]

I've heard about a texture upgrade which would be like 150 gig, which seems to imply to me that Id weren't willing to take their chances on selling a ~200gig game. I mean the thing is that I think that of all the games of its particular look, Rage is probably on par with Blands in terms of general art design, but their intentions were probably too ambitious and they ended up having to cut corners. The game certainly doesn't seem actually bad in a 'real' sense: the gameplay seems solid if not groundbreaking, the setting is well realised if somewhat derivative etc etc.

I mean if I was John Carmack I probably would have just told the boffins to release it on fifty DVDs but I don't think anyone would ever accuse me of having good business sense. Then again, making compromises on your engine when you were marketing on how amazing your engine is is also not great business sense, sooo ...

[Executor32]

It's still a good game IMO, even the graphics look nice as long as you stay at least 50 feet away from everything and don't turn around at more than a snail's pace. If the game took place entirely in the open and there was no running around through buildings full of corridors, then it might have worked, or if they left the landscape textures low-res and just made high-res textures for buildings and shit. As it is, though, I can't recommend buying it right now, not for 60 bucks. Later on, after a price drop and/or a patch to fix the graphics issues, then sure.

What puzzles me is that, as I mentioned, the texture pop-in doesn't occur on the 360. What did they do different with that port?

[Stark]

If it's streaming off the megatex, the smaller textures but similar HDD read speeds might explain it.

[Starglider]

What puzzles me is that, as I mentioned, the texture pop-in doesn't occur on the 360. What did they do different with that port?

This might be because the Xbox360 has unified memory; there's no need to stream textures across the PCIe bus (a bottleneck on some cards and motherboards) or replicate GPU data in main memory. Although I still thing that megatexturing is overhyped for the same basic reasons that voxels (e.g. that Infinite Detail scam) are overhyped. They both make sense for some purposes, but using them exclusively is inherently throwing away a very useful form of compression (abstract geometry & surface detail reuse) that frees up more resources for things that actually improve the game experience.

[2000AD]

Graphics problems aside what I've seen and heard about the actual game has been promising and I'l probably get it, but going back to the graphics issue ....

I have a quad core and 4GB of Ram which meets the recommended specs, but my graphics card, a Geforce 8800 GTS is only at the minimum required not the recommended. Anyone have any experience on whether or not that's going to be enough to play the game? Most of the problems seem to be with ATI cards.

[Starglider]

I have a quad core and 4GB of Ram which meets the recommended specs, but my graphics card, a Geforce 8800 GTS is only at the minimum required not the recommended. Anyone have any experience on whether or not that's going to be enough to play the game? Most of the problems seem to be with ATI cards.

The minimum VRAM required is 256 Mb and you have twice that, and the 8800 is a PCIe2 x16 card, so it should be playable.

[starslayer]

GTS, not GT. His card only has 320 MB of VRAM, and is much worse than an 8800 GT performance wise. Still, the game will probably be playable anyway.

[Starglider]

GTS, not GT. His card only has 320 MB of VRAM, and is much worse than an 8800 GT performance wise. Still, the game will probably be playable anyway.

I thought it was 512, but checking Wikipedia it's clear I was thinking of the 2007 8800 GTS, not the 2006 8800 GTS which came in 320 Mb and 640 Mb versions. Nvidia's stunning ability to renumber an existing card to clear inventory, but then use the same name for completely different cards... anyway, which one do you have 2000AD?

[2000AD]

According to a Graphics card monitoring program I downloaded when I was having some computer issues a couple of years back it's a 2006 one, which is annoying when I bought it in 2007. I second the opinion that re-using a name for cards with different specs is retarded.