I've just finished the game and am going to write a review about it. I have heard a phrase "unsuccessful launch", although I haven't had any problems with Rage whatsoever, except the redrawing textures, although my system is very old, and that happens in some other games too.

So I am wondering, what is the situation on Rage's technical side for everyone else?

I have an AMD system and since the game launched I had been dependent on the community based fixes. First I had to tweak my config to make it run with the 11.9 drivers. After the 11.10 Preview 2 driver came out I finally was able to play the game without customizing anything. Preview 3 worked but caused a few crashes. Now with the final 11.10 I had to apply again a community fix that is basically using the OpenGL part of the 11.10 preview 3 drivers and the game runs but is crashing from time to time.

Thank you, ATI VGA trouble - noted.

Is there any other problems/bugs people run into?

Man, there's more bugs than anything, actually there's more bugs than bugs on a hot summer night.
It seems they cannot fix it.
We need to fix the fixes, and the fixes also need to be fixed, can some of us still believe this?

we are frikken copying DLL files from older drivers to newer drivers and the other way around. atioxxx.dll needs to be copied all over before something is working and its STILL not working like it should work.
RIDICULOUS IT IS

This more or less encapsulates my situation with Rage. I was able to play with the preview 3 drivers but that caused me rendering problems with other games and I had a lot of driver crash/recovery messages when switching between profiles. The official 11.10 driver did not work for me (the game would not load beyond the intro and saves did not work) but that was fixed by adding the atioglxx.dll from the preview 3 drivers.


The game looks better with the official 11.10 driver but I still quite frequently get crashes when zoning and the occasional very brief freeze where CPU usage shoots up to 100%. I have over 29 hours of Rage gameplay logged on Steam. Most of that has been starting and restarting the game, trying out different drivers and config files, and trying to get the game running properly. I've only just got past the boss mutant at Dead City in terms of actual game content. I dread to think how much time I have wasted uninstalling, cleaning, and reintsalling various drivers. Several hours at least.

All in all, a less than satisfactory and very frustrating experience. I don't know who is at fault for all this. I actually don't really care to be honest. In my eyes, as a long term gamer, AMD, Bethesda, and id software have all come out of this with a lot of negative karma. I bought a AAA title at a premium price and the product really was not fit for the purpose, one way or another. The fact that I still cannot play the game stress free almost a month after release just reinforces my negative feelings about Rage.

My system is a Core2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHZ, HD6850 with 1GB DDR5, 4GB system RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium.

I share the same opinion with you RobUK, totally.

I'm wondering if any Nvidia users are having any problems with Rage, or is it only ATI?

Also, any in-game problems that I might've missed? To mark it as an "unsuccessful launch" because it doesn't work for specific piece of hardware, I don't think it's appropriate. But then again, I've read it on some blog, and unsuccessful sounds better than "doesn't work for ATI users" as a title to get more users to read it...

I don't think "unsuccessful launch" is too far wide of the mark. I think the arguments about who is to blame will "Rage" on forever.

I believe ATI has something like 40% market share of the GPU market. If even 20-30% of the people that bought Rage for the PC have ATI cards and haven't been able to play the game, I'd say that was a pretty big problem and only in the gaming industry would we tolerate such shoddiness. No other consumer product would be allowed to "fail" so widely. As an AMD/ATI user myself, this lauch is pretty damned "unsuccessful" in my book.

The only thing that has really been missing from all of this is any kind of statement from AMD. I'd actually really like to hear their take on all this. The other thing I'd like to know is, just what drivers were id testing their AMD based systems with? Considering Mr Carmack said that internally Rage was "running well" on AMD based systems, I'd sure like some insight into what drivers allowed them to play the game without problems.

I wouldnt be surprised if they were testing the game on 12.1 or 12.2 and in the meanwhile amd is "fooling" us around with a JUST in time end-of-the-month halloween release 11.10. It's totally ridiculous.
They really should step off their monthly driver releases. I would prefer solid drivers instead.

Like many other AMD/ATI users I had lots of trouble getting Rage to run well on my system using a HD4670. At one point I did have the preview 2 drivers working pretty well but after installing the preview 3 drivers I could not get Rage to work well again. Even after trying a reinstall of the preview 2 drivers I had poor frame rates, texture corruption with an overall sluggish performance. I think aside from the poor drivers AMD may have a problem with how the driver package gets installed. I experienced errors during two driver installations which required me to reinstall. Each time I used Driver Sweeper to clear out of the old stuff. It was a real PITA doing this over and over again. At that point I realized AMD is clueless on how to fix the problem so I purchased an nvidia GTX 560ti. Rage has been flawless since. I'm running it 1920X1200 with a smooth 60FPS. It may be worth noting that I've never experienced a crash with my ATI or nvidia cards.

Personally I think Rage looks fantastic and it is a solid game that is fun to play. I feel all the gripes with the textures are a bit overstated. Yes if you get up close to things some textures look rather crappy but during normal game play I do not notice it much at all. I originally played Rage on my Xbox and the PC version is much better visually. The level design is awesome and the artwork is fantastic. The Dead City and Jackal Canyon levels are absolutely amazing. One thing not mentioned much on this forum is the game sounds. The weapon sounds are just right and the ambient sounds are well done and creepy. The implementation of 5.1 surround sound is also great. Character animations are top notch and sometimes even surprising. I wish the game wasn't so linear but most games in this genre are. My only real gripe with the game was the ending. It undoubtedly svcked and definitely felt like the game was suddenly cut short in development in order to make a deadline. Having no boss at the end just felt wrong.

The only game I think looks better than Rage is Crysis 2 using the DX11 enhancements. I've been playing both games over the past month. Crysis 2 is really good.

One thing that has baffled me is the lack of communication coming from id regarding the ATI issues and development of the next patch. Based on a few tweets it appears there is a patch in the works but there has not been any information provided beyond that. Why do these companies feel the need to keep the customers in the dark?

Nvidia users have had thier share of problems, but from what I understand theirs have been far less agregious. I know some trolls will show up and tout how thier Nvidia cards are magically superior in some unexplained way. And they religously believe this without any substantial, even anecdotal, evidence. I managed to get mine working with various .dll workarounds. The .6 version got the game running but with missing textures and a god awful glare. I am now running find with a preview driver from .8; after I installed the lastest driver, I had the same blue screen issues as everyone else did. I have the drivers installed for issues with other games but I am sticking with my current fix.

As far as who is to blame on this issue, all these parties are culpable, frankly. I don't see why no one here has accepted responsiblity. It is somewhat understandable if a game has bugs because they are very complicated technically. But an acceptable bug is something like that an npc is not working correctly or a side-quest doesn't complete due to code issues. Or even if a specific video card fails because of its design and specific drivers just doesn't work and a work around needs to be applied. These things are out of a company's control reasonably. Not that the game doesn't run for a large portion of your customer base. A large portion is more than 10% than your customers. This game was developed for consoles, Carmack flippantly told us so. But that is no excuse for a deficient PC product. That seems to be ID's attitude towards this whole situation. It is unacceptable period. There are many examples of games built for consoles that have great ports. Fable 3, Batman AA and AC. Rocksteady and Lionhead released thier PC ports when they were ready. Id didn't and they deserve to be criticized for their poor performance.

Hansenhaus i couldnt agree more with you, everything you wrote is rock solid true. I played crysis 2 also and i must agree there the graphics are top notch.
I could also recommend metro2033 for you, its an amazing game.

I've a slightly older laptop with an NVIDIA GT230M that I've been running Rage on. Technically the game has been more or less flawless since release, even on the out of date drivers I was originally using. Performance is solid, it tends to get slightly sluggish in Subway Town, but otherwise framerates are consistently in the high 50s.

With the older drivers (258.96) and pre-patch I was getting texture pop-in but the well-known config file fixes resolved that. Post patch, removing the config file and using the in-game video options menu was necessary. I'm able to use the large texture cache with this machine and still maintain good framerates at 1600x900.

I have experienced no crashes, no lock-ups, and no stuttering. Before the new (285.62) drivers I had a brief intermediate period of using 280.26, but experienced huge OS stability problems. This however was a known problem with that driver revision and was a result of changed power management modes; 285.62 reverted this change back to what it was before and I haven't experienced one single issue since. These problems happened outside of Rage, and are well documented on the NVIDIA forums.

My specs are:
Intel i7
8 GB RAM
GT230M with 1 GB VRAM
64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium

I should note here that I don't overclock anything and I leave my driver control panel settings at "Application Controlled".

I've yet to be able to play the game after 30+ days. All I get is CTD after the opening cinematic.
This is after:
Reinstalling
Trying the start options in steam.
Turning off ccc ai and tripple buffering
Turning them on as well
Downloading and doing clean installs on each of the new amd drivers
Trying support suggested configs
Sending emails to amd and ID
Voodoo
Human sacrifice.
Throwing chickens at my pc
Mailing chickens to John Carmack
etc...

Im running a amd 64x dual core 6000+
ati 4850 (512)
4gb ddr3 ram
on Win xp 64bit (Its not smoking fast but it's more than capable)

What drivers are you using?

I was usind 11.10 till I saw the recomendation to stick with preview 2. so I went back. I've also tried replaceing the newer dll with the older one. To date I've had zero success. I'm actually waiting on game stop to process my refund request

The problem is mostly with drivers. Really I think it will be faster for id to just release a DirectX renderer than for AMD and Nvidia to iron out their OpenGL woes across all systems.

AMD has more problems on average than Nvidia. Before the client patch I was using the 16K cache size workaround to solve the pop-in issues, and since I updated my drivers before playing the game I had no problems with texture tiles being mapped to the wrong places. 11.10-3 introduced new crashes, so I've rolled back to 11.10-2. The problem is that this game has extreme performance problems when something doesn't work, but works flawlessly when the stars are aligned. For me that was a fairly easy process (AMD X3 720, 6950 2GB). For others maybe not.

I can only suggest using another .dll many are using .6 I know it doesn't work for me I tested .6-.10 and the only one that works for me is .8 All I can suggest.

no luck but it was worth a try. like I said im just waiting for an Email from gamestop... I probably wont be buying doom 4 either ...

Still unplayable here with my 4870.

I am trying to run on Rage on a laptop, and it wont run for crap. I've tried every suggestion given. Currently back to Catalyst 11-10 preview 2. The game runs beautiful for 1 to 5 minutes then crashes to a white screen. I have to say this is the first AMD video card I'v ever bought and unless this is fixed soon it will be my last. On that same note I have supported Bethesda and ID Software for years and the same goes here. I have spent my money on a game that was clearly not ready for release. It's very frustrating. I don't know why they would care at this point that I am happy with their product or not because they have my money, meaning Bethesda, ID Software and AMD, but i'm not and they will not get another cent from me if this is whats is to be expected.

2nd generation Intel Core i7-2630QM Processor 2.00GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.90 GHz
8GB DDR3 of RAM
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
AMD Radeon HD 6770M - 1024MB GDDR5

Thanks everyone for input. It seems that the only really big problem is for ATI users.

I've mentioned this problem in my review and took it into a consideration as well. However the conclusion was that RAGE is a great piece of work, despite this bug.

Well i have a amd processor and a ati graphics card and have had no problems with the game at all. I know im very lucky but not all ati users are having these issues.