Is it possible for id tech 5 to have higher texture detail? This Dlc has much better detail then the main rage game, but compared to games like crysis 2 texture detail it still looks like [censored]. Is this what we will expect from doom 4?

It's a completely different art form and way of producing a video game, view this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaSwK5AjRKg

Yes it is possible to have higher detail textures. I'm not sure the DLC does have better detail - depends where you look I suppose?

If you have a video card with 3gb of ram and a hex core processor you can produce the highest resolution textures for Rage. Doom 4 will be the first game to enable AMD's new hardware acceleration for megatextures that allows the gpu to use system ram for storing even more textures. With future advances like 1Tb/s hybrid memory cubes and cheap 1Tb optical disks ultra high resolutions will become possible, say within three years or so, and eventually set a new standard for video game fidelity. I'm talking about resolutions so high you'll still know it is a cartoon, but the resemblance to photo-realism will be undeniable.

It's a storage issue. The original, uncompressed textures will look better but would be huge. How would id distribute such large amounts of data?

I recall reading that id MIGHT release a demo room for RAGE with high-detail textures.

Torrent?

It's possible, but not at the current 60fps -- no way

Yes it's possible.

@ravioli, you can still have 60fps, if your computer is strong enough. You can have 60fps and HD texturing.
Unfortunately not the weaker machines, and not consoles this gen.

Lol, the tech demos make me see how better Rage used to look... the plants were actually 3d!
I want those, I don't like the blurry flat sprites we have as plants

@John Carmack (or someone at id/Bethesda who can tell him), please move forward away from 60fps for a bit, I want mega-detailed scenes

Of a long time I want to post topic about this. First sorry for my english.
If you watch the Matthew Hooper http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dbgZJPVbFAg#t=156s id tech 5 demo, you'll see... the texture resolution and the "level of detail" is completely different. Even depth of field effect. Does RAGE have depth of field? They cut cut too much, because of consoles. They do it wrong - first consoles and second PC. Its easy way, but wrong way.
Can you see this cactuses in RAGE ? NO. Why they (pc and console) must look the same ? WHY ? Put settings for these, cut the old console version only, but why we need to suffer
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/8118/rage01.png

Yeah, the foliage (plants) looked amazing in 3d, then were turned to flat pictures.
Something that wouldn't happen in a PC-first game :T

Edit: I mean for leaves it's okay, but not for trunks and branches, and the 2d cacti look awful

Yes, possible, but impractical. Torrent is not an option for console users. I think we're talking around or greater than 1TB (1024GB) of data - probably about 40+ single layer Blu-ray discs. For the 360, that's a lot of DVDs!

As with a lot of id engine technology it's ahead of its time.

Who cares? Why should I care? Is it my fault they are running ancient technology? No. Why punish me!?

If they want high quality - get a PC, thats always going to be the case. End of story.

Fair enough, but how was I to know you were a PC elitist?

Besides, I don't think the consoles are dragging the texture quality down. I still think it's a storage and distribution issue.

I'm not an elitist, I own a Wii and a PS3. It's just the facts my friend. The consoles are running ancient technology - it was old when they first shipped and it's years old now. Which is ancient in the hardware world.

Yes storage & distribution have always been an issue and will be for some time. For PCs and consoles but more so for consoles due to their nature. With a PC you just need more money to spend!

People own a PC for a reason, more power and freedom. I would seriously buy a 2TB drive just for RAGE if it would improve the overall quality - that's not an option for a lot of people. But if it's possible and I am willing, why prevent me?

Depends if releasing the game's textures uncompressed is an easy thing to do, whether it would just work and how many would show the same interest you have. My guess is they don't feel it's worth their while.

It's not just a storage problem, it's also bandwidth. Re-uploading a full uncompressed scene would take literally forever - in CPU to GPU communication terms. If you thought texture pop-in with the version we have was bad...

Ironically, this is one area where consoles would be stronger than PC as they would provide direct access to video RAM rather than having to go through intermediate API and hardware bus layers.

Of course, in the case of both consoles and PCs, getting the data off disk in a reasonable time would also be another bottleneck.

Doom 4 will have much better textures for sure. id is always about pushing a games grahics to a new limit.

I wouldn't be so sure about that (and a note to the "they promised!" merchants: I'd be very careful before getting any ideas about id or Carmack "promising" higher texture detail - there are ways of making things look better that don't necessarily involve upping the texture detail levels).

Hmmm...

I just don't understand why people always ask for higher texture res.
Rage looks fine the way it is.

The megatexture concept is good for rendering complex and detailed scenery at the expense of highres imagery when watched close.
But when do you ever do this while playing a game?
Most of the time you'll be walking or driving around the maps, always having the full scenery in sight.
And this is where ID Tech5 easily surpasses all other available game engines today.

Standing in front of a wall, looking at it's cracks is not what games are all about...

Rage looks fantastic when played on full 1080p.

The PS3 version suffers texture pop-in more than the 360. Didn't Carmack say it was mainly because Sony would not allow direct, unbuffered HDD read and write?

Also, the PS3's Blu-ray read speeds are much slower than the 360's DVD read speeds. A common solution also used for Rage is a mandatory installation.


Agreed. People need to stop studying assets under a microscope. Low res textures are not really noticeable while playing the game properly. Texture pop-in is a bit distracting to me on PS3, though.

Yeah, lack of unbuffered read on the PS3 was cited as a factor IIRC. That would effectively stream all texture data from disk to system memory twice - once into the buffer it's going to send to the GPU from and once to the OS's file cache (from where it's just going to be discarded on a future read op). Nasty stuff if it's true about Sony not allowing it.

Well this was a long(er) post but to summarize:

People want higher res because Rage's is too low whether you admit it or not. It doesn't take careful studying to notice the awful blurriness. You might just be scoping in for a kill with your sniper, and out of nowhere you get this blur so huge that it looks like they textured that area with a single color pixel.

Anywho, as I've stated before somewhere, the overall size of the megatextures is fine. What's not fine is letting it go to waste by using tiny pixelated textures as their brushes, and scaling them up to cover larger area. This is why some parts of Rage are too blurry. Alot of the wasteland is detailed enough to look pretty, other areas were neglected. Note that when it's all baked, the atlas tiles with less detail are just as big as the tiles with more detail.

Which is indeed a special PS3 problem.
When playing Rage on 360 from DVD it takes about a second for all textures to display at full res.
When installed to the harddrive, this effect is almost completely gone and only noticable in very detailed areas when turning around quickly.
There are games available on 360 which have more problems with deferred data loading than Rage.
The Bioshock series, Borderlands 1/2, ...


I can only assume that Sony does this buffer thing for some copy protection mechanism or it's related to a badly designed OS.

Rage has about 22GB of data. Games this large a very rare. Most people seem to forget this.
The scorcher DLC on 360 which has just about 4-5 real maps already consists of 2GBs of data.

Most people don't keep in mind that all this data never fits into memory at once and needs to be streamed permanently to render the area which the player is currently looking at.
The more memory you have, the less data you have to stream and the less disc access you will have.

Like you said:
PS3--> Least available main memory and slowest disc access. Bad combination for games that utilize huge amounts of data.

To everybody else here complaing about Rage looking like this because of consoles:

Rendering or shader perfomance does not play any role in this context.
Even if a hardware has more power than another, it's memory concept can severly degrade performance.

Rage's bottleneck is memory access and memory size. Not shader performance.
And this also applies to PCs running ultra expensive graphics cards.


This is the case with most games featuring a sniper scope.
I never played a game which actually enabled you to examine the bacteria crawling on the wall you're looking at.

As funny as this may sound at first: this is primarily a game concept problem, not just a technical one.
If the engine is optimized for rendering large open areas, you have to downscale the graphics detail for objects which are far away and don't need that many pixels to display correctly on screen.
Otherwise you'll run out of fillrate even on highest performing graphics cards without any visual benefit.

But if you pull far away and therefore low detail objects into full screen via the sniper scope, you will always find ugly spots in any game.
Enabling the player to observe far away areas like you can with the 2x zoom on the sniper rifle in Rage is always dangerous from a designers point of view.


That's the usual compromise that has to be made by all game designers.
All games which have a free first person view let you get close to things and suffer from this problem. You never know what might be of interest from the player's point of view.
Beat 'em up games for example do not have this problem due to their fixed camera position.
This concept needs way less detail for rendering a scene.

I am not talking about uncompressed. Just on par with current gen games like crysis 2

Not at all texture detail is so bad at times it makes me cringe. Its a big catch 22 when the only big graphical affect is texture uniqueness at the cost of detail.

Too bad this doesn't apply to Rage. As I said, the less-detailed tiles are just as big as the more detailed ones in the atlas. There is no reason NOT to take advantage of all the space you have. Also note that in the Rage tech demo they spoke of how a guy made an amazing parking lot in about 15 minutes.
It shouldn't have been too hard to have a special team that looks for "blurry spots" that the artists have missed, and then adds the detail themselves.

Anyway, as I said, the overall resolution is fine. The ground, for example, may be kinda blurry, but most of it looks really nice and more detailed than the canyon walls and even objects in the game. So the overall megatexture's resolution is fine. What they need to do in the future is detail EVERYTHING. Mountains, filler-objects, everything. The lack of texture detail is often fine when you have dynamic lighting interacting with the surfaces, but in a baked environment like in Rage, you pretty much have to stuff as much detail into the textures as possible.

Edit: Oh and, I feel I have to mention this now
I am FINE with Rage as it is. I just want them to do a better job next time around, in their future projects