When I pass the gate during the "Dan's Message" mission on the way to Wellspring to enter that large, open area, the game starts stuttering horribly. It freezes graphically for seconds at a time and the sound glitches and cuts out except for ambient noises, then cuts out completely. I have to CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart the game, but then the same thing happens when I attempt the mission again.

I have already tried enabling VSync, Triple Buffering, enabling/disabling GPU Transcoding, enabling/disable anti-aliasing, increase the size of the cache, and verifying local content in Steam. I have the 285.38 nVidia drivers installed. I bought the game from Newegg, not Steam, so I can't get a refund.

Is there anything else I can try? Do I just have to hope they patch it? This is BS. No more Bethesda games for me after Brink and this.

EVGA SuperClocked 012-P3-1573-AR GeForce GTX 570 HD
MSI P67A-GD65 (B3)
8GB Corsair Vengeance
Intel Core i5 2500k
Corsair 750TX v2 power supply
Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro

I deleted the entire Rage folder under Steam and redownloaded all 21GB of it again, and it seems to have fixed the problem. Very weird that "Verify game cache" didn't detect any problems, but redownloading it helped.