Because one of my friends asked me how I solved it, I made an article:


http://imbacore.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-to-solve-rage-texture-streaming-pop.html

The guide contains the command lines that Nvidia listed. However, I toned down my graphics settings instead of placing what Nvidia laid out in its instructions. The result? Problem free gameplay. I'm currently uploading a video showing me playing the game. Will post it here too.

The guide also contains links to another resource that offers performance-enhancing tweaks for XP users.

Even with these specs:

CPU: Core 2 e7400 2.80Ghz
Motherboard: MSI P45 Neo3-FR
Memory: Kingston 2Gb DDR2-800
Videocard: 9800GT

I could only play at 640 resolution. Now I can play at 1024. Take note that my PC is a low-end machine.

I hope this will help some people.

Sorry for the double post; clicking on "edit" produces a "you do not have permission to do this" pop-out window.

Anyway, here's a vid of me playing using the tweaks I applied: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9U9jpQNoVk

No texture streaming.

i fail to believe you can only play in 1024x768, even with a crappy 9800gt
i have an e7300 and play 1680x1050 max everything with a gtx460

yes look and it can be played at that setting

That's what people have been telling me. I don't know though, either I've got sensitive eyes or the game doesn't like Windows XP 32-bit and only 2GB of RAM. Or maybe there are services that's eating up major CPU resources that I need to disable.

Before the tweaks above, even 800 resolution was unplayable; the hitching/stuttering was just so bad.

Edit: And oh, have you guys overclocked your system? Every component in my PC is running at stock speeds. Maybe that's the reason?

I solved my stuttering issues because windows was only recognizing 1 core for my i7 920...my bad I had upgraded mobi drivers but was using old bios. Once that was resolved Rage was silky smoothe.

Yep, my guide also details how to force the game to recognize the correct number of cores. I think the auto recognition feature in the latest patch is messed up; when I manually added the line to my config file, RAGE ran noticeably smoother too.