On Saturday a massive patch landed for Rage, eagerly awaited by players struggling with blurry, popping textures, low framerates, psychedelic artefacts and more. The mess of a PC launch has been so severe that John Carmack referred to it as "a real cluster !@#$" in a written statement to Kotaku, and attributed the problems to the release of incorrect drivers by AMD and Nvidia.
"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 wrote, adding "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."
This weekend a huge patch hit, adding workarounds and tweaks to counter the most severe crashes. A number of graphical options have been added to the menu as well, letting players take over from the auto-detection system that was supposed to automatically tweak Rage's options to help it run as close to 60 fps as possible. Players can now alter V-sync, Anisotropic filter and texture cache settings manually.
"The original release of RAGE does not expose many video/graphics options for people to tweak because some of these settings, although desirable from a quality perspective, simply will not work on specific configurations either due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs," reads a note in the Steam patch notes . "Due to popular demand for more video and graphics options, this patch updates the video settings menu and exposes several quality and performance settings. However, not everyone may be able to increase the settings due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs."
The Steam patch notes have extensive details on how each aspect of the new graphics options will work, and a list of known issues with certain graphics cards. Meanwhile, here's the summarised list of patch notes.
- 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
