im buying a video card next week.....either a gtx460 or a radeon 6850.....i have read different reviews and have seen that both companies are having their share of problems with this game.....i would be thankful for any suggestions


system specs

amd x2 555 black
4 gig ddr2 ram
asus m3a76cm motherboard
600 watt pawer supply
windows 7 64bit


thanks !!!!

I'd go with the GTX460 since problems for Nvidia cards is history for this game. Haven't see any problem reports in a while.
On the other hand ATI is still having reported problems even with there newest release driver 11.11c.
Rage was a hot topic for a while with all the problems with drivers "not so much with nvidia" to date most post here
are people looking for help for ATI/AMD video cards. I check the forum every day. A lot of people"ATI" have just moved on to other releases.
Still waiting for a fix all problems driver.

thank you

Your cpu is a bit on the wimpy side and Rage can be easily tweaked to use Nvidia cuda to do some of the work otherwise done on the cpu. The 460 will definitely give you better performance.

Nivida hands down. They have better drivers.

thanks....another vote for nvidia

Another NVIDIA recommendation here. AMD may seem very tempting on price, and it may seem as though you're going to get a lot more for what you pay, but it's just not worth the hassle (witness the trouble that almost every recent release is having on AMD). My dear old mother always used to say that a good thing was only expensive when you were paying for it, and she was right.

I also recommend the 1gb version of the 460 if you can afford it. The megatextures in Rage take up a lot of vram. It may not improve performance, but the textures could be better and the 1gb video card is just significantly better all around.

I have had ati video cards for years and have had my share of driver headaches.....im taking everyones advice and buying nvidia.....thanks for the responses

I have ati 6870 and I recommend you to buy ati,they have great performance in most games , the driver problem could be fixed soon for sure,I play all games in ultra setting without laging or problem

The thing is they have had years to fix open GL drivers, but they never fixed them.

I own 2 radeon 5850s myself and don't have any problems, but he wants to play Rage with a wimpy cpu and Nvidia cuda is the way to go. If it were any other game I'd recommend AMD just for the better bang-for-your-buck they offer.

not trying to start a nvidia vs ati war....i am 47 yrs old and have been buying amd and ati products the whole time...i am tired of fighting with drivers...its time for me to see what nvidia has to offer....might not be the best bang for the buck but i want something that is more stable and i dont have to fight with for days.....i want to thank everyone for the help

I'm 51 myself. Rage is an anomaly due to it using an advanced openGL engine and it seems AMD got caught with their pants down on this one. Otherwise these days AMD and Nvidia are extremely competitive and have comparable quality. Just a little fair warning not to expect miracles by switching to Nvidia.

"Not to expect miracles by moving to NVIDIA"?

Sorry, but that's not a fair warning. The truth is that Rage problems have been more or less entirely isolated to AMD hardware and/or drivers. Aside from a small handful of occasional glitches (which may be genuine bugs in the game and not related to hardware or drivers), NVIDIA has been utterly rock-solid with the game from the outset. Those of us who have been playing Rage since release day without experiencing any of the problems reported here have been saying, till we're blue in the face, that the problems were caused by AMD drivers. Those of us who've actually done any OpenGL programming have been giving our experience to back that up. AMD fans have been twisting and turning and trying to shift blame elsewhere.

Hopefully that situation will change as AMD start getting their drivers in order, but for now, if you want to play Rage, AMD is not a good recommendation. Price/performance doesn't matter here; it's a clear case of: "price, performance, the game works - pick two".

AMD's problems with the drivers are due to it being an openGL engine and an unusual one at that. Its one of those rare cases where they obviously screwed up big time. In the past Nvidia has even released drivers that fried people's video cards, but its not like I judge all their work by a few extreme cases.

Not all their works, Just all their Open GL works.

What other openGL games have they had trouble with?

Doom 3
quake wars
Brink
The penumbra games

People are foolish to keep buying AMD cards. The hardware in them is great and so is the price but the hardware is just scrap metal if the the drivers svck, which they do. You get what you pay for.

Doom 3, Quake Wars, and Brink all use the id tech 4 engine which like the id tech 5 in Rage was another cutting edge funky implementation of openGL. Penumbra uses another exotic engine almost no other games use. So basically you're saying they've had trouble with drivers for two exotic openGL engines which is exactly what I've been saying. Its not that AMD svcks at all openGL drivers, but they evidently do struggle with the more exotic engines. Not surprising considering its just harder in general to write drivers for openGL and 95% of games use Dx.

There's absolutely nothing funky or exotic about Doom 3's renderer. Have you looked at the code? It's just straightforward GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object, GL_ARB_vertex_program and GL_ARB_fragment_program stuff. They even used GL_ATI_fragment_program where available (which one would expect should work on ATI hardware).

It was reported at the time that ATI's then-cutting-edge Radeon 8500 didn't even manage to draw the console correctly when first tested: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_2002.html - that's using glTexGen functions that have been part of OpenGL since version 1.0; nothing exotic there.

Here's a report on the issue dated from 2004.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/7265/8

The problem was with rendering textures which is exactly where the engine gets funky with its megatexture technology. Evidently their video cards treated the megatextures like they were ordinary textures and tried to automatically adjust the textures to improve performance when, of course, the game is supposed to do this for itself.

Doom 3 did not use mega texture.

i guess i was lucky....doom 3 ran fine on my clunky ati card......long ago