Rage's PC Launch Problems Attributed to Driver Issues [UPDATED]

@Vorhenze said:

So my experience after getting home from work following reading up on all this (at work)

• I installed these latest drivers.
• I forced vsync in the Catalyst Control Center
• added the following to my launch options in Steam:

+cvaradd g_fov 12 +com_allowconsole 1 +com_skipIntroVideo 1 +m_smooth 0

The game is running amazing now. It was miserable last night before I had to go to bed. Now it's silky smooth, no tearing, and slight pop-in of textures.

Unfortunately, forcing vsync causes the game to crash almost immediately. Usually just after the Bethesda logo intro video.

So my experience after getting home from work following reading up on all this (at work)

• I installed these latest drivers.
• I forced vsync in the Catalyst Control Center
• added the following to my launch options in Steam:

+cvaradd g_fov 12 +com_allowconsole 1 +com_skipIntroVideo 1 +m_smooth 0

The game is running amazing now. It was miserable last night before I had to go to bed. Now it's silky smooth, no tearing, and slight pop-in of textures.

@Sin4profit: There is a setting that you can set that will turn the un-skippable intro off

@shakra: Nah, doesn't help my case. I was aware of the problem with triple buffering for awhile now. I've adjusted all the controls in catalyst, ran the game in full screen, windowed, all different resolutions, created the cache file folders, uninstalled drivers, reinstalled drivers, i've watched the damn unskippable intro cutscene more then i'd care to at this point and i'm so tired of struggling to make this game work i don't even think it's worth rolling back my drivers to 11.8 and playing from those semi-functional drivers.

I'll wait for, at the very least, more announcements for the few of us who are still having problems but if i don't hear anything by Thursday i'm just going to demand a refund from Steam...I don't even know how to go about doing that as i've never done it before. It's bad enough that select games now cost $60 on PC, "just cause they can",but those games should, at the very least, work.

John Carmack's gonna make you his bitch. Suck it down.

@Kartana: The drivers worked for me, before them it was still crashing to the desktop. Though texture pop-in still happens but at least I can play it.

The latest beta driver, which is made for Battlefield 3, seems to have helped things out a bit. Not that there were substantial problems for nVidia users. But there should really be customizable graphics options, right now the game is using no more the 60% of my GPU's power, which is a shame. Despite my complaints, the Wasteland looks amazing, and the game is a lot of fun to play, which in the end is all that really matters.

@TomA: @TomA said:

I love reading things written by Mr.Klepek. His articles of my main points of reference when I'm writing my own articles.

Sadly he just gets his information from other sources, like all news writers. This information is not always correct, like in this case with Rage. The new drivers fix not everything.

I miss the days when PC gaming set the bar.

I love reading things written by Mr.Klepek. His articles of my main points of reference when I'm writing my own articles.

@Rattle618 said:

This is so disgusting I cant even start, fuck them.

Which them? ATI? Yes, Fuck ATI. It's 2011. They've had years to get a decent OpenGL driver together for their consumer hardware.

@buckybitsaid:

Don't be fooled. Saying it is a 'driver issue' is putting the blame on AMD & NVIDIA. IMHO, it's a id engine / megatexture tech issue instead, because of GPU virtual texturing?

see Siggraph 2009 talk by J.M.P van Waveren, Senior Programmer id Software

(link to pdf file! 4MB)

dynamically streaming texture and LOD (Level of Detail)

Link is broken :(

Also I don't think we are being fooled. Why would they be telling us to wait on drivers then vs. patches? They would be in a lot of trouble if this is really the case. Also even Carmack is tweeting for people to get the latest drivers; http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack

I've heard of drivers with rage issues, but never this.

@Sin4profit said:

@Dagmar: Nope, I uninstalled everything, reinstalled, rebooted and NOW the game crashes everytime i try to start it up...so things are getting consecutively worse for me.

Try disabling tripple buffering in your card control panel. The driver updated fixed it for me so I turned that on along with forcing vsync. The tripple buffering crashes the game.

I just found this amusing @John_Carmacko twitter.

@Singen: Get right out of town! On Reddit?!?

saw this on readit

lol.

@Dagmar: Nope, I uninstalled everything, reinstalled, rebooted and NOW the game crashes everytime i try to start it up...so things are getting consecutively worse for me.

Here is a good tip: Don't ever browse /r/gaming. It's a giant cesspool of nostalgia and meme circle jerking.

Also why is jump mapped to the Y button instead of A? Goddamnit id

@wolf_blitzer85: Forcing V-SYNC on AMD cards apparently made the game crash before the driver update, so you couldn't really do anything about it.

I would imagine someone in the Whiskey Media offices would know how to force on v-sync to take care of the screen tearing problem.
 
 Of course I guess what really matters is that there wasn't any option for v-sync in game, but I've gotten to the point where I don't even use in game v-sync and just force it through d3d overrider as that seems to sill be quite reliable.

I have an Nvidia Gtx 570 and im running the BF3 beta drivers 285.38. I haven't encountered any framerate problems or texture pop. Sometime when I spin around really fast in a newly loaded area you can tell there's something going on around the edges, but it's not egregious.

I had flickering issues before the ATI driver fix that have now been solved. The screen tearing was really, really bad until I forced vsync at the driver. All seems to be well after the driver update. Recommended.

Don't be fooled. Saying it is a 'driver issue' is putting the blame on AMD & NVIDIA. IMHO, it's a id engine / megatexture tech issue instead, because of GPU virtual texturing?

see Siggraph 2009 talk by J.M.P van Waveren, Senior Programmer id Software

(link to pdf file! 4MB)

dynamically streaming texture and LOD (Level of Detail)

This is truly the year of disappointments. *sigh*

@k4el said:

@wolf_blitzer85: Sorry man but I'm going to shoot that comment down. You're clearly speaking from an uninformed position.

I guarantee this wasn't "missed" by the testers. They brought it up, it was shot down higher up the chain. QA departments in every company everywhere have to struggle against business and design decisions in order to get issues addressed.

If you're going to put the blame on some one I'd look at Bethesda or higher up the chain at ID and of course ATI may not be completely guilt free in this as well. It's not like they're known for being on the ball lately.

+1 to this. Beat me to it, but you forgot this comment;

@InternetDetective said:

How did they not know about these problems, did the play tester not notice?

I am 99% sure all the issues are sitting on a bug data base right now.

If this is truly just a driver issue then a driver update is going to fix it, I hope there is a combo of further optimization in support of better drivers. Terrible that it has released this way though...but we don't know how it happened. Maybe id brought these issues up with AMD or Zenimax/Bethesda but they pushed the current version anyways.

PC will be the best version eventually. I think now more than ever id Software should deliver on the "maybes" Carmack talked about during his keynote at QuakeCon 2011. Such as a high resolution texture pack and what not.

@wolf_blitzer85said:

If this is how game development works, then things are just going to get worse. I would think that the QA (especially for bigger games) would have a stronger pull in the development process since I would also think that the team would ideally want to put out a fully working game. I also wasn't trying to put the blame on anyone in particular either. I'm just amazed that this technical issue managed to make it out into the open, especially when the textures are a big draw to the game.

That is how it works, mostly, haha. QA has little pull because they are not designing, developing, etc. so the “value” of anything brought up falls in someone else's capable hands to make a decision on changes or fixes. Personally everywhere I have been, QA do their damndest to stop the bugs before they get to you, trust me.

It is still kind of amazing how this got out in the open right? I agree with you there. Like I said earlier in this post we have no idea where the fuck-ups began. Maybe AMD didn't even reply to id's emails.

@tapoxi said:

@James0890: Because Rage is an exclusively OpenGL game. I can't remember the last time a AAA titles used OpenGL instead of DirectX's Direct3D.

I can't remember either maybe pre-2005. Despite the problems so far I am glad it is OpenGL 4.2. Hey maybe there will be linux build because why not and id Software traditionally does one.

@Buzzkill: But its not like fallout at all...

@Sin4profit said:

Updated drivers: wow, and i thought it was unplayable before. Now it locks up for a few seconds every few seconds.

The video above may help you if you haven't done it already. Creating those cache folders solved it for some.

Updated drivers: wow, and i thought it was unplayable before. Now it locks up for a few seconds every few seconds.

@OldGuy: The thing is though... even if the drivers published on ATI's site are out of date. They're the drivers the end users would be using and testing should have occurred in parody with the end user experience.

ID or Bethesda should have known about this, even if it is 100% on ATI from a technical stand point.

To fix the tearing, enable Triple Buffering and Vsync through Catalyst Control Center.

Issues with which Driver? San Francisco or Parallel Lines?

@k4el said:

I guarantee this wasn't "missed" by the testers. They brought it up, it was shot down higher up the chain. QA departments in every company everywhere have to struggle against business and design decisions in order to get issues addressed.

If this is how game development works, then things are just going to get worse. I would think that the QA (especially for bigger games) would have a stronger pull in the development process since I would also think that the team would ideally want to put out a fully working game.   I also wasn't trying to put the blame on anyone in particular either. I'm just amazed that this technical issue managed to make it out into the open, especially when the textures are a big draw to the game.

rage is out on friday in the uk and i was gonna get it on the pc but looking at all this crap I'll just get it for the ps3. shame i thought the pc would be the best.

@tourgen: Except the benchmarks most sites do are very much based on real world performance, they play the same parts of the game and record the framerates.

Also you can't blame this all on AMD/ATi, ID released a game that is supposed to work on AMD hardware before making sure that it actually does.

@wolf_blitzer85:

Thank Bobby Kotick and his ilk for this sort of attitude. Games are big money. That means big marketing, that means big release dates. Which means compromises are inevitable.

Thankfully there are places where this sort of thing doesn't happen. Valve and Blizzard for instance (yes I know Blizz is part of activision). The indie scene is also amazingly good about this sort of thing because they have a reputation to establish and can't hide behind hype.

Gamers have to vote with their wallets by not buying poorly tested buggy games. The pre-order crazed phenomenon doesn't help either.

@Gav47: People have a right to complain when the product they got was shit, if all my others games work fine on AMD cards how is it their fault that Rage is broken at launch?

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

These should be the proper drivers, fresh from twitter from the CatalystCreator guy.

Here's the latest fix. Apparently, the games install doesn't create an important folder that caches textures. This video walks you through creating that folder...

The corrected AMD driver is here

[Insert troll-ish comment about how consoles are better/easier to use.]

Nah, I'm just kidding.

I guarantee this wasn't "missed" by the testers. They brought it up, it was shot down higher up the chain. QA departments in every company everywhere have to struggle against business and design decisions in order to get issues addressed.

@zaglis said:

LOOKS GOOD! SHIP IT!

developers need to learn how to hold on to their product until it's done

@zaglis: That is a huge bummer! I have that exact same GPU, and very similar rig all together. I'm running BF3 Beta at max with AA no problem. It runs and looks like a damn dream!

Rage is a great looking game but I can't believe they chose to leave so few video options out of the PC release!! That's what us PC gamers live for! It's silly but it's true and I can't believe iD shipped it like that.

I'm sure the texture pop-in issues will be fixed, but that really does suck for anyone wanting to enjoy the game right now. I switched my copy to the PS3 at last minute and I'm kind of glad I did... I know it won't look nearly as good as it would on my killer PC but at least I can play with my PC-less friends.

Good to see people aren't being hyperbolic about the issue on the internet, good work all around folks.

@avidwriter said:

I only buy ATI cards because nvida charges too much for only a few more FPS in 90% of the cases. Just sucks that most of the time game developers, only use nvida cards to develop their games.

ATi are generally cheaper for the performance, in benchmarks. In 'games' though both devs and Nvidia seem to support and optimize faster and more deeply than what can be seen on ATi gpus. If I have to pay whatever you think is 'more' for that then I take it, every time. I like have beta updates for my 4 year old gpu still improve current game performance and stability all the time, and when new games come out nvidia is almost always on top of very fast updates for that game to get it's performance up quickly. They recently delivered 30+% increase for the open beta for battlefield 3, which is kinda crazy. That update has since seen another, and this is for a beta of a game.