So I just bought myself an S27A950 monitor and I have to say it looks pretty amazing.

Unfortunately I'd just uninstalled all graphics intensive games so I couldn't really see all it had to offer aside from Uncharted 2 and watching Dark Knight on bluray (if you haven't seen the IMAX shots on an awesome screen the you are missing out on something huge!). I cleared up some space on my PC in time for Rage. This is pretty much where shit hits the fan for me. I install Rage, read around to see what drivers I should try with my AMD5770, install those (11.10 preview 2) and then boot up Rage. Lo and behold what greets me is pretty much the worst fuck up a game has ever done on me. First it started off as being the barest of textures, think Deus Ex but full bodied and well rounded instead of the sharp polygon edges. I try and run around but but as soon as I get out of the first room/spaceship or whatever shit just turns grey and things are barely distinguishable. I get the hell out of the game pretty quickly after that and spend the next few hours trying to get the game to run. Eventually I try using some older drivers, thinking hey it worked for some people it might work for me. I was wrong. So I give up and head to bed.

The next day after I get back from uni I jump on again and try to fix it. I used driversweeper to get rid of all my graphics card drivers, unfortunately this seriously messed with my computer so I had to system restore that.... I try reinstalling the 11.10 preview drivers tweak the Catalyst Control Centre a bit and see how that goes. It progressed! But ultimately failed. Instead of plain boring textures appearing before my eyes I see a twisted Picasso collage of shit. Once again I hastily leave the world of Rage, on the computer at least.

I delve a bit deeper in to the forums and try out using the console as some people have suggested to load their custom made configuration files. I tried this a bunch of times with next to no progress. Sometimes I'd see the plain textures and sometimes I'd see the collage. At this point I'd almost given up but I thought that I may as well give it one more try. I clean my computer of anything AMD related, although this time not so swiftly and haphazard as with driversweeper. I then reinstall the preview drivers for Rage, turn everything to their lowest setting and BAM. It works.

I run a few more tweaks using what people suggested in the Steam forums. But frankly the game ran with about the same elegance as the old guy at the end of A Space Odyssey. That is not only was it tripping out and slow but I had no fucking idea why. I'd used all the launch options people told me to use. The game was on the lowest settings possible. It looked like shit with textures constantly popping in. The framerate would drop consistently whenever more that two people decided that I needed to die.

I think at this point I should say my computer is not shit. It's probably mid-end right now and consists of an i5-750, 4gb ram and the aforementioned 5770 running on 32bit Win7. It's more than enough to run any recent game....and yet that list doesn't include Rage.

At this point having spent around 10 hours trying to make the game work all I've managed to really do is develop an overwhelming hate for everyone at iD. Reading recent interviews and things I can't help but feel extremely frustrated over the fact that the game they made just did not want to run on my computer. Is it something they have against me as a person? If so why? You're hurting me far more than From Software ever has. At least they have a sick sense of humour when they send me off to die. I'm no developer, nor do I have any idea what goes on when developing games, but it's hard and I mean really hard to see how they managed to overlook such a flaw in their game. You can't just blame it on drivers being optimised for Battlefield because then the game should really have worked using drivers from months ago... I still don't understand how so many people could be bitching about the Battlefield 3 beta being so much like a beta, and yet there's a few articles here and there about this flaw that is so far inherent in Rage...

So yea, if you're still thinking about Rage and you have an AMD card, then I hope you have the luck you will most certainly need.

For me that's about as far as my Rage adventure will get and to put it bluntly, fuck it I'm gonna play Dark Souls.