Hey guys,

As part of my job I write content for NVIDIA's GeForce.com, and today that's a quick guide for unlocking high res textures in Rage on the PC: http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks (this works on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs)

Our CMS is in the process of republishing the page because we've since tested the 16K stuff mentioned in the article and have found zero improvements going from 8K to 16K. To improve things further would require a texture pack, as mentioned once by John Carmack.

Thanks!

Trying it now. Will report back.

This fix almost eradicated the texture pop-in, but there is still some, though.

Thanks

I got a GTX 295 1792MB. As no SLI is available, I can only use 896MB! Sad. Will there be SLI support?

Unfortunately I'm not an engineer and as such can't answer that, but as there's no CrossFire support either I imagine that the GPU companies will have to work in concert with id to make multi-GPU work.

Hey AndyB, thanks for your demo's and the post/link. Can't wait to get home from work to try this - I'm going to be SO PUMPED if it works out, even if it removes the texture popping, but your maxed out screen of Dead City looks like what I was EXPECTING when I paid... thanks in advance!

You can try this too http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1236250-rage-support/page__p__18743528#entry18743528 and there's even an experimental CUDA Core GPU Transcode tweak out there but I personally wouldn't recommend it until it's been tested further.

Eh, runs about the same as it did when I DLed the new Rage ATI drivers. I think I just need to wait for a patch. Everything is pretty smooth for me but a bunch of stuff looks like tiles with mashed potatoes on it.

holy sh*t!!! I tried this and my friggin textures look GORGEOUS!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOL, i think i'm somewhere around 8k, will post some pics a bit later...

NOTE: if i turn of transcoding, the fix doesn't seem to do much, but with it enabled, seems quite impressive indeed!

So in other words there are high res textures in game there just not being enabled by the auto graphics or what ever it is.

For me this made the texture popping worse and the texture quality no better. I only have a 1.5g card, though.

Nice Andy, but before I try this, can you recommend a good image size number for a GPU with 1GB VRAM?

8192. I would suggest disabling AA in the options menu and not using AF in the config file, seeing how it works at 8K, then gradually adding AA back in. I've seen reports from people saying it works fine with 1GB and other saying that it doesn't, so it's totally hit and miss at 1GB.

Also, I updated our story with some Transcoding tweaks that until now were a tad mysterious: http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

Wow, absolutely wow, this looks amazing. Playing on a 3gb 580 card with this tweak and it looks fantastic.Thanks alot.

there is no hi res texture to unlock - this is 25GB distro not the 150GB hi res textures - if anything you are uncapping the stream speed so you see the texture sooner - not hi res.

Just wondering, does the game/pc read one 295 as sli, due to it being two cards in one, or do you have two 295's and the game only uses one?

I ask because I know when two cards are sli'd they only use one cards memory. But if you mean the game won't use the one 295 and only half, thenthats [censored].

"With the configuration file removed the Auto-Balancer was given free reign. The result was textures of a higher resolution, compared to the forced 4K textures, but well below that of the forced 8K textures. As such, we’d estimate that this represents 5-to-6k."


ALL THIS IS DOING IS REMOVING THROTTLE ON STREAMING _ YOU STILL GET COMPRESSION via MEGATEXTURE steaming from a compress source/ NOT 25 GB source files./

They are being creative in the description of the streeaming unlock. it still has same degrade source megatexture pack / not turn HI-RES full install 120-150GB.

I HAVE SSD RAID AND GET GOOD GRAPHIC DUE TO LOW LAT. ON STEAMING TEXTURES 500 MB/sec (4000 mb/sec) read. This just makes you HD ?SSD the limiting factor if your Vid RAm can HANG.

With SLI, you would still only be able to store 896MB of texture data. Because each card is drawing different parts of the same scene, they have to have the same texture data. So, if you have multiple GPUs in an SLI configuration with the same amount of memory, the amount of texture memory that you have is limited by the amount of memory each individual card has. If you have two cards with different amounts of memory, it would be limited by the card with less memory.

Well I ended up trying it just as is and to my surprise even with 2x AA it seems to run just fine. Textures are better and less pop-ins too. I have just a Palit GTS 250 1GB Green edition OCed a bit, but it seems to handle this game beautifully. I imagine one of the reasons it's not a problem is I only run 1280x960 since I just have a 22" (20" viewable) Dell CRT display.

On the GPU Transcoding tweaks, I did read about those too but it seems it's only recommended if you're experiencing texture streaming problems if I'm not mistaken?

Thanks for your help Andy, you guys at Nvidia always put so much care into how well games run on your product, and others as well. You deserve praise for it.

Oh, one last question before I forget. My neighbor has a GPU similar to mine but with only 512MB VRAM and he runs a 1280x720 res. Can he make any use of this tweak if he lowers the image size a bit, or is it even possible to lower it from the 8192 value without it looking the same as the default textures? From what I recall values pertaining to memory usage can only be halved or doubled, so I'm doubting it.

Read your entire article, did everything And no changes. Still looks awful except the npc's

AMD 6970 2gb, Athlon II x6 3.0ghz, 8GB DDR3

same here, the only thing it did was things stayed rendered for a longer time. I turn my back and things are rendered faster but final product still does not look better than Doom 3 or quake 4, hell no.

Did everything and no changes... ><
Why isnt it working x_x

I know you mentioned these settings work for AMD users; however, I imagine commands such as vt_useCudaTranscode and vt_cudaBudget are not going to work for those of us with AMD cards, correct? Do you happen to know what we should use instead?

As Transcoding doesn't work on AMD cards, because they lack CUDA Cores, the only tweak in that section that will help is vt_maxPPF, unfortunately. As such, your Transcoding is being done entirely by your CPU, hence why AMD users are experiencing so many issues.

http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

is there a way, a console command to see if we are using 4K texture or 8K texture?
Thanks.

This fixed everything for me atleast. Dont forget to read all the way to the bottom. they have 2 or 3 extra items down there I added and they worked wonders!! I was having extream texture pop, this fixed it.