So the patch #2 just dropped today, and it has the new 'detail texture' option.
It basically tries to make textures appear more crisp by sampling other textures on top of it.

Anyways I figured I'd give it a try and give you some comparison pics:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9629/beforepz.jpg - http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/5066/aftervp.jpg
http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/7277/before2m.jpg - http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/7720/after2n.jpg
http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/8886/before3.jpg - http://img862.imageshack.us/img862/166/after3.jpg

The game also now lists "GPU Transcode" as available in the options, even if you have an ATi Radeon card - but then it'll tell you that your video card won't support the feature (only nVidia GeForce 8xxx or later series support it).

The game also has a benchmark feature in the video settings. It'll give you a score about how well your system will transcode the textures - on an AMD Phenom II x4 965 at 3,4 GHz I got this score:

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/1410/benchmp.jpg

I'd like to see what score other people get. The score will depend on how fast your CPU is (or GPU if you have GPU transcoding enabled).



Update:

If you find the noise-amount to be a bit too much at times, you can configure the noise amount to apply in the console with the following command:

vt_upsampleNoise X

"X" being the desired amount (default: 8).

Here are some comparisons between different noise amounts:

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/7900/ups8.jpg
http://img861.imageshack.us/img861/5482/ups4.jpg
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/3639/ups2s.jpg


Update #2:

Somewhat unrelated to this patch - but the single player campaign of Rage now seems to be available for http://www.bethblog.com/2012/02/02/rage-campaign-edition-now-on-mac/ also!

I've got a 940 @ 3.6ghz and a vertex 2 SSD and it gave me a score of 32. Makes me wonder what it takes to even get 50 much less 100.

I5 2400@ 3.6ghz gives about 43 when GPU transcoding is off. Turning on GPU transcoding on a 580gtx gives score of 107.

Got a 92 while at the main menu and got 76 whien I tried it in-game. i7-2600k stock. Had to turn it off though due to bad fps.

Interesting, and makes perfect sense. Nice to finally have some way of benchmarking the game. Should be even more interesting to see how Doom 4 does with AMD's new hardware acceleration in contrast to Nvidia cuda.

I wonder if this feature could be implemented into the consoles aswell, or if it would be too demanding to run and still get 60 fps on the consoles. Maybe we will see it in Doom 4 on consoles as it targets 30 fps on consoles.

I went from 38 to 102; not sure what type of i7 I have, but it seems as though GPU transcode really works well for me after this patch (it didn't before).

The option demands at least a quad core cpu and preferably Nvidia cuda which no console have, so no, its not gonna happen even if they reduce the frames per second. Maybe the next generation consoles, but both Microsoft and Sony have stated they are in no rush to produce the next generation consoles. At this rate its PC all the way baby as both MS and Sony have decided they still have too much money to milk off the current generation consoles.

i got 74 at the benchmark. I have a i7-950 overclocked to 3.33, ati 6850 also overclocked, i guess the downside of my rig are my sata2 hdd. Also 12 gb Ram

Honestly, I was extremely dissapointed in this. It doesn't actually make it look that much better. It just takes away a bit of the blur. I waited months to play and I decided i'm just not going to play it.

Strange I have 2xGTX480's and 2600K @ 4.4Ghz but can't enable GPU Trancode and still get a 109 score with the benchmark.
Wonder why I can't enable GPU Transcode?

Got a score of 92 on the benchmark here. I got a Factory OC MSI 560 Ti w/ AMD Quad-Core 965BE with 4GB RAM.

Small tip to getting higher benchmark scores - the following commands help out:

jobs_numThreads 'X' - number of threads to use for the game - defaults to 2. If set to 4, the score should pretty much double (assuming you have 4 or more cores), halve at 1 et.c. This setting should be lower than the amount of physical cores in your processor (ideally: half the amount, rounded down) while playing however, as a setting of exactly the amount of cores in the processor will cause significant performance drops and/or freezes while playing as the entire CPU will be busy.

vt_splitTranscodeJobs 'X' - (either 0: OFF or 1: ON). This will split the transcoding jobs into two threads per page. Seems to be an optimization for hyperthreaded processors (various Intel i7 processors, Xbox 360's Xenon CPU) - disabling seems to improve performance on my AMD cpu (jobs_numThreads 1: 16 (on) vs. 23 (off), jobs_numThreads 2: 32 (on) vs. 46 (off), jobs_numThreads 3: 47 (on) vs. 67 (off), jobs_numThreads 4: 53 (on) vs. 74 (off)).

From those results, I was able to speed up the texture transcoding process by about ~50% simply by using that command.

Thanks for the tips, xaxxiron777! Thanks to setting these two console commands the right way, my benchmark score went from 36 to 71

My benchmark score has also doubled, thanks xaxxiron777

The texture detail option gives me really bad texture pop-in, much worse than when it's disabled. Almost as bad as it was at release. My transcode benchmark scored at 227 mega texels per second, so this shouldn't be happening, should it? Is anyone else having trouble with pop-in caused by the texture detail option?

have 1.2 patch, i have 82 in the benchmark test.