After installing RAGE on my ASUS VX2 notebook with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700, a warning appeared when trying to start the game, saying the driver was out of date.

I downloaded NVIDIA's latest driver (specifically for this card), and updated. But I still get the same warning, and the game still won't start. Just end up with the same XP error send request.

What's up????

The Forum speaks of a RAGE PC patch, but no link to the patch. Where is it???

The Forum also directs us to update NVIDIA drivers by going here... http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-285.38-beta-driver.html ... but I am not sure if this is for my GeForce Go 7700!

Come on, guys! This is a lame way to launch a game!

Please advise regarding game patch and graphics driver update, or any other advice.

Thanks!

Hi mlien,

the Rage minimum system requirements demand a GeForce Series 8 Card (GeForce 8800 to be exact). Since your notebooks gfx chip is a GeForce Series 7 Chip, Rage will most likely not run on your system at all. You'll have to purchase new hardware to play the game.

Ahhhhh... ok. Thx.

That's weird, shouldn't it just be the NVIDIA GPU Transcoding option that would only be available on GeForce 8xxx (or later) due to being the series NVIDIA CUDA was introduced with?

Thanks for chiming in here. This VX2 is hardly an outdated notebook, and was the cutting edge not long ago. Of course, I have a newer/faster PC back home to run this on, but it seems a shame if it can not run.

But regardless, the game won't even start up right now, maybe because it sees the 7xxx status of the driver, and there declares it is not updated.

I wonder what would happen if I applied the update recommended in the forum (my card is not listed in the supported devices list).

The driver package would either update or tell you your card is not supported, would be all.

The GeForce 7700 in mliens notebook is based on the G73 chip whereas the 8800 is based on either the G80 or G92 chip. There are some major differences between those gfx chips for instance the G73 chip implements the DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0 specifications and Shader Model 3.0. The Geforce 8 Series chips G80 and G90 implement DirectX 10, OpenGL 3.3 and Shader model 4.0. If Rage requires any functions that have been introduced with the latter specifications - and the box says "Enhanced for DirectX 10" - the game won't run on the older hardware. So in this case the culprit is really outdated hardware I'm afraid.

DirectX? Huh, must be a misprint. The game is purely OpenGL as with previous ID Games. ID Software has said so, game overlays like Afterburner report OpenGL aswell, and Carmack has even said he was wondering if recompiling the game under DirectX would somehow magically fix any problems with it.

Thats what I heard in past interviews with J. Carmack too. Anyhow when in doubt I rely to the info the publisher provides on the game, they should know it best. But even if the box has been misprinted and Rage is a pure OpenGL game the issue stays the same. They'll most likely have made use of Open GL 3.3 functions the GeForce 7 series (OpenGL 2.0) does not provide.

You need to reformat your harddrive and reinstall windows.

Be careful what you download, some files can corrupt your installation.

Try using windows add/remove programs feature to remove the driver before installing the new one. And choose "Clean Install".

OK... but if I remove the driver... will the screen on the notebook still function enough to install the updated driver?

And... has anyone else had any luck running RAGE with a GeForce 7xxx driver? If it's not likely to work, I don't really want to struggle much longer with this. But if others have run it, than I'll keep the hope alive!