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

This is truly the year of disappointments. *sigh*

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)

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.

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 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.

@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.

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

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

@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.

saw this on readit

lol.

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

I just found this amusing @John_Carmacko twitter.

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

@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

@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.

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

I miss the days when PC gaming set the bar.

@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.

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.

@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.

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

@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.

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

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.

@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.

@Sin4profit: It's hard to get a refund from steam. The few times I have tried they reply with a 'we dont refund software' line. I just call amex and they refund me though.

Day 1 buys are painful buggy messes these days.

Learn some Direct X Carmack. Jesus fucking christ. I had almost gotten over how you fucked me and millions other ATI graphics card users in the ass when you decided to shit up Doom 3s renderer by sticking an Nvidia only stencil shader in there and deciding it was fine to ship because hurr, it runs fine on the graphics cards Nvidia gave you. Retire from the business together with Willitz, or pick up some fucking DirectX and let Romero handle Willitz work, Ro's a special boy but he's damn good and fun, as we've told you in the past..

Patrick, please ask them what drivers the testers were using + what drivers they expected people to be using.

This is weird. Twilight Zone.

Even for (some?) nvidia users the issues are just as big. I have a Nvida graphics card and the texture pop-in couldn't be worse. I have the latest drivers and enabled updates and I also tried almost every "fix" I found on the internet and it's still just as bad as before.

Waiting impatiently on game patch and/or driver updates.

@Arkasai said:

I miss the days when PC gaming set the bar.

They still do but there being held back with shit like this.

The driver worked for me even with my boot-camped Macbook Pro which is finicky with drivers due to its unique dual graphics card setup. The texture pop-in is only sometimes noticeable and it happens once as opposed to every time I turn. The framerate also appears to be somewhere around 60, which is nice. I really do with there was a V-Sync option though.

@Branthog: Fortunately not for me. I just played for about an hour, no crashes to desktop. I was very concerned last night. I'm very happy now.

Even ID forgot how to program PC games :/

New drivers + forcing v-sync through CCC improves things 10 fold. The game plays great now.

@thetrin said:

New drivers + forcing v-sync through CCC improves things 10 fold. The game plays great now.

Same exact thing for me. Dual 6870's and perfect 60 frames at full settings. Which is a huge improvement from the unplayable insanity that I had earlier. It looked worse than Stalker: Clear Skies after it launched, and anyone who played that will know how incredibly fucked that game was at release. Funny anecdote about Clear Skies, the shitty graphics support in the original release caused my card to overheat constantly, and one of the artifacts was that my double barrel shotgun extended infinitely off into the horizon.

@shakra: So after installing a bunch of windows updates and activating the quad cores in my CPU, the game seems to be working now...i have no idea if either of those things are what's responsible but somehow it works.

At least i dont have to go through Steam for a refund but now i'm too busy to play it after i wasted the entire day just to get this one game to work.

How's the game running with the new AMD drivers? It should be finished downloading at home and going to try it once I get home from uni.

Pretty sure I haven't played a "real" PC game since boot disks were all the rage. All I'm reading in this thread is pops and clicks.

Good luck, folks!

@InternetDetective:

http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/ship-it

Seriously, with tales like that, how can anyone bitch at the way QA pans out?

FYI the fixed AMD/ATI drivers introduce a "grid" bug that people who tried the PC version of Brink may be familiar with if they use AMD hardware. Essentially everything in the world appears to have a 1 pixel wide gap in a grid pattern across it.

not to be a fan boy but its times like these that make me glad my main system is nvidia

This video people may find helpful as well. While the usage of GPU transcoding is vendor locked to Nvidia (why they wrote this in CUDA instead of OpenCL I will never know, especially considering Carmack's love for all things starting with 'Open') I believe everybody will want to fix the cache file creation problem. Texture pop-in got a decent chunk better once the cache was up and running (SSD goooo) so I recommend everyone take a look.

On a side note I decided it would be amusing to see what would happen if I mounted a RAM drive as the cache folder and tested to see if anything got quicker. Not a huge improvement over the disk cache but a minor one.

in Australia we have to wait til October 7th to have this unlocked ... good thing is hopefully most problems would be fixed by then :D

@Bunny_Fire said:

in Australia we have to wait til October 7th to have this unlocked ... good thing is hopefully most problems would be fixed by then :D

You can get around that, I certainly did.

It doesn't surprise me that Giantbomb is having PC gaming issues. Stick to consoles. It's what you know.

I don't understand how it's all because of hardware drivers - texture pop-in is apparent on 360 and PS3. AMD updated the drivers on 9/28, which was after Rage went gold, so I can see the update possibly causing problems; however, it's possible for either id/Bethesda or AMD to issue a day-one fix.

AMD did screw up putting out a borked "fix" earlier in the day, but putting all the blame on video card drivers is rediculous.