I've been poking around here without signing up since the game was released. Like many of you, I was wanting to play this over a year ago, remembering the first opening of DooM 3 to get released. When it did, it was a PC crusher of a monster. Looked amazing, scary as hell. Beautiful. So it would be fair to expect the same no?

Now I know they had to cross-play the engine to work with consoles. I get that. But am I missing something with the texture availability? I would think that the engine could go both ways, just simply favor the option of having insanely detailed textures for PC users who want to run them, leave the blurred out stuff for consoles & lower end PC's but keep the pretty NPC/Vehicle stuff. I actually -expected- that. I feel like I'm missing a setting somewhere that will bring out the real textures that match the NPC's and Vehicles level of detail. (Please tell me I'm using the wrong config or that I'm going blind...I'm using Beta Nvidia drivers + "HD" configs).

I know I've been spoiled with games like Quake 4 and Fallout 3 looking better then these world textures...and then the mind boggling re-release of Fallout 3 HD textures (definitely spoiled there).

Never mind texture popping and artifacts...what happened to the bump mapping, HDR lighting and all the other delicious goodies that I hoped ID Tech 5 was supposed to bring? Up until now, I thought the new patch was going to fix the texture detail level.

Am I alone in expecting better texture's, lighting and effects? At the very least, something that stands against Fallout 3's HD pack or the incredible lighting of Doom 3?

To be overly simplistic, computer graphics thus far have advanced by people adding whatever bells and whistles they could squeeze onto a chip at the time. It was a bit haphazard, but it produced a lot of really creative ideas and great results. However, now the graphics cards are so advanced they can actually do calculations and cpu processors with 8 and 10 cores are about to come on the market. Everyone has been scratching their heads trying to think of new ways to use all those hundreds and thousands of processors that can suddenly be added to your home computer cheaply. One answer is to use them to overcome bandwidth limitations which is exactly what Doom 3 was created to do and now Rage has taken it to the next level.

You can run Rage on a dual core cpu or, theoretically, on 24 cores of a cpu. If you have a dual core cpu and an Nvidia graphics card, it can switch to the graphics card instead for most of the work and improve the performance. The textures can be so extremely compressed and use the available bandwidth so efficiently you can play Rage on an iPhone and it looks great on such a small screen. Unfortunately the more you compress textures the worse they look on larger screens. The original Rage program is 150gb, mostly uncompressed textures, which is just way too big to download online. The compromise was to compress it down to 22gb which is still very large for a download, but not ridiculous. Its still good enough for weaker computers with smaller screens, but not so great for better systems. However, John Carmack has suggested id might release a less compressed 75gb version in the future that will look better if your computer can handle textures that large. Unlike the textures most games use that are repeated throughout the game, these big Mega Textures take up a lot of space on your graphics card vram and the more vram you have the better. For an idea of how good the uncompressed textures look just look at the characters in the game which look phenomenal.

Exactly how much vram people will need to use the higher textures and see serious improvement is the big mystery right now and id isn't talking. However, this isn't just a trend that id has taken up, but the future of home computers in general. Using more bandwidth more efficiently means we'll all need more memory to go along with all those thousands of new processors. Thankfully memory is getting both cheaper and faster by leaps and bounds, and you can already buy gaming graphics cards with 3 and 4gb of vram.

I hope for the sake of ID, they really do release a version with 'proper' textures.

Your explanation was actually very interesting to read (I was aware of most of it, but learned a bit too . Very nice.

The NPC's and vehicles just...make it contrasted so much more that the worlds textures and the lighting are beyond acceptable. I'm even looking at Bioshock and seeing a significant difference in visuals (if your excluding NPC's and vehicles once again).

I've been playing since DooM was new (I'm older but as old as some gamers here), and this is the first time I have seen a game that I honestly have no idea what is so great about what is going on "under the hood". Seen alot of game engines...really wondering what makes this one so "tech demo" looking vs the others that are currently in use.

So, what is it about Rage and/or Id Tech 5 that 25gb's of Game...and it looks like hell vs games that are in the 6-10gb range and still supercede Rage in texture detail levels?

The game has great art. Too bad all that is hidden thanks to the broken engine most of the time.

When I entered the Dead City, all I saw was blurry textures. It remained that way. Game kept on giving me high quality textures like 4ft from my distance. Everything else was resized to 256x256 or something lame like that. Well, it looked DEAD all right..

It's a shame though. The only new thing idTech 5 has (that other engines don't have) is the ability of Megatextures to give us unique (read=detailed) environment. Too bad you can't see the detail thanks to the game resizing every texture after 4ft to 256x256 for you. )


PS: Play Witcher 2. Game looks amazing and surpasses RAGE in every possible way.. WITHOUT RESIZING EVERY TEXTURE. Now THAT is how you make a new crossplatform engine which looks and plays bloody brilliantly.

If you look around you'll see that there are no repeat textures anywhere. Every rock face, floor, wall, etc. all have unique textures. That means unique graffiti or whatever everywhere you turn. Its more obvious in town then on the road, but especially the Jackal level shows just how amazing even the tall rock formations can look with distinctive textures.

The next id tech engine planned will also incorporate real time ray traced geometry. I would guess they'll first try to squeeze in all that extra data just for the characters. Imagine the already gorgeous character textures being laid over any shape the artists care to create. No more wire frames, no more triangles, no more limits. Just to see that I'd gladly put up with low texture backgrounds. Combined with something like modern motion capture technology the sky it is the limit. Its won't be photo realistic, but as close as it get with a cartoon character.