I had stupid bad pop in on my system. Here is how I fixed it inside windows 7.

First - http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk

Download this ramdisk package. It lets you create up to a 4 gig ram disk for free. I use it on servers at work and it has never caused a problem.

Second - Install RamDisk and have it create a partition. I created a 1.5gig drive. DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE INSIDE THE PROGRAM.

Third - Bring up the Disk Management snap in.

Fourth - Right click on your ramdrive and select "Create a new simple volume"

Fifth - Once you set the size of the drive you want to select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder" and point to "C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Local\id Software\Rage" NOTE: Make sure the 2 bin files in this folder are deleted if they exist. If this path does not exist - create it.

Sixth - Click next. Select NTFS as your formatting option and click next, then finish.

If everything went to plan you have created a ramdisk that maps to the cache folder that Rage uses. Since ram is balls fast - and rage won't use above 600mb on my system - the engine can recall cached data MUCH faster than it can from a traditional disk. The first time you start RAGE and load up a level the engine has to rebuild the cache files and you should have about 10 seconds of HDD activity where the textures stream into view and cache. After 20 seconds in a new area everything is cached. Everyplace you go for the first time after doing this will require the cache to be updated - this takes maybe 12 frames to happen and then its smooth with no popping. Once the engine finishes building the cache file- texture poping is totally gone.

NOTE: If you re-start your system all the time you will have to do this constantly. No power means no more drive. You could always write a power script to do this on start-up if you really wanted to.

Its also kind of crap that RAGE won't cache data in ram when it has access to it. Hopefully this gets corrected in a patch. Ram should be the level3 cache instead of the HDD. I have yet to find a cvar to force it. Also, here are my config options:

Lauch Options: "+cvaradd g_fov 12 +set com_allowconsole 1 +set com_skipIntroVideo 1 +set image_anisotropy 16 +set image_usecompression 0 +set g_showplayershadow 1 +set m_smooth 0 +set mem_phymemblocksizem 3096"

base\rageconfig.cfg "

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
fc_maxcachememoryMB 3096
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4
ik_enablesmoothing 0
image_usecompression 0
jobs_numthreads 4
"

I tested on AMD and Nvidia hardware (GTX 460, 560ti, 9800gtx, HD6950, HD5780) with the latest beta from Nvidia and the latest Rage driver from AMD.

It appears that this is a combination of Drivers and Rage (it needs to be more aggressive with resource allocation and caching inside said resources.)

This works for me and the systems I have tried it on. YMMV. Also - i noticed that killing the search indexing service improved performance (if rage is caching files on your HDD and windows is trying to index them....problems.)

This is kind of a bonkers thing to do but the game plays like butter now - no pauses, no stutter, and it looks better because of forcing 8k textures. Now all I need is a way to kill that annoying post-process effect that messes with the shadow in certain parts of the world. I spent an hour fiddling with stuff before I realized it was happening on purpose. For whatever reason Rage is not grabbing resources from my system. Its memory footprint never drifts above 600mb. I have 16gb in my system so I can spare the 2.1gb footprint rage is using - I also tried this on a 4GB system and it worked fine. Good luck and I hope this helps someone. The game is friggin sick once the technical issues get ironed out. Its stunning at times.

Interesting. Are you combining this with other fixes, or is it a standalone thing?

In addition to the latest drivers and my configs - this is the only thing I added. It always seemed like my system was struggling and after running rage inside a performance profiler I saw it was hitting my HDD all the time. I figured out it was hitting that folder so I created a ram drive and mapped the folder to it. Latency is virtually 0 now when rage needs to hit that cache file - which it still does- but with the bandwidth and latency of ram its not an issue.

I think I'm still going to wait for an official fix. If that never comes, I suppose I can put my 12 GB of RAM to work. I'm too tired of trying to fix things at this point.

I hear ya. I suffer from being an impatient [censored] and after waiting 7 years for this game I am not letting anything stop me from playing it. Now all we need is the x64 executable so modding can commence post haste.

Hi, I have 2gb ram (4x512mb sticks) can i use this program? =/

+set mem_phymemblocksizem 3096"

also what is the number attached to these commands mean?
fc_maxcachememoryMB 3096
vt_maxaniso 4
jobs_numthreads 4
and what is

vt_restart ?

Your RAM is probably too low; you won't have enough left after OS + Programs + Rage for a sufficiently sized RAMDrive.

2 gigs is to low Im afraid. Creating a ram drive physically allocates that chunk of ram for the drive. The OS and any program running can't touch it. The cache files seem to hover around 1.4 gigs (and you need extra space on the ramdrive). You would only have 512mb of ram available to windows and everything running on it using this method.

vt_restart : this restarts the virtual texturing system. Doing so flushes the cache and forces the changes to take effect - namely moving from 4k to 8k texture pages.

jobs_numthreads : This specifies how many threads RAGE should be running. Rule of thumb is at least 1 per core (more with hyper-threading enabled i7 systems)

c_maxcachememoryMB : Deals with Cache file size.

vt_maxansio : anisotropy level used on virtual texture pages. Helps determine final image fidelity.

true story

Wow... never heard about this program before. Very nice idea. This might be useful for a a whole lot of other things.

Thanks for sharing.

Do note that a RAMDrive will erase itself if your computer is powered down.