It took me hundreds of hours to make the game run with a playable performance.
BUT NOW I CANT GET RID OF THIS F****** TEXTURE POP INS!

Come on ID or Bethesda or both!
I dont want achievements I dont want HD Textueres I just want to play without stumbling over blurry textures when I turn the corner.

ATI HD 4850, Amd dual core 5000+, 4 gb ram windows xp 32 bit

Allready tried launch options and rage config... now its way better than before but still too ugly to enjoy.
I need help .. iam waitng for months now and still its not fixed.
any ideas how to fix this?

There will always be texture popin to an extent. How much will depend on A: the size of your texture cache and B: the speed of your CPU (or GPU if GPU transcoding is enabled for NVIDIA GPU's)

but iam runnig on ati so theres no way to enable GPU transcoding for me?!
I dont get this i can run every single game on nearly highest graphics but rage has extreme low textures even when they are fully loaded and although it svcks like this.

"But everything else works!" must be a favoured line of ATI users.

This is nothing whatsoever to do with ATI but yet everything to do with them.

All other games use static images for their textures. These might be images at, say, 256x256 or 512x512 resolution. You take an image of some brick, repeat it a few times across a surface, and you get a brick wall. You load the image once during startup and it stays in video RAM where it can be quickly accessed as required. Everything from Quake to BF3 does this and the downside of it is that you get a very obvious repeating pattern. Some more modern games try various tricks to hide it, but it's still there.

Rage doesn't do this. Rage doesn't have repeating textures, everything you see in the game is completely unique and non-repeating.

Now, this is obviously stupid because there's no way you can do it; you'd need a 128000x128000 texture to do it, current hardware just does not support textures that size and is not likely to in any kind of short or medium term, if ever. But yet Rage does it.

The trick is that it dynamically loads portions of this huge image file (which answers the "why is Rage so big?" question) into a smaller texture on your video hardware - 4096x4096 or 8192x8192. In order to load this at some kind of playable framerate it first loads in lower quality versions of the image portion, then progressivly loads in higher quality versions until you get the full thing. If it can load them in fast enough you don't even notice it happen; if it can't - that's the dreaded Rage texture pop-in.

Here's where we start having fun.

NVIDIA can load them fast enough.
Intel can load them almost fast enough.

ATI on the other hand svcks for updating dynamic textures at runtime. Yes, they're good (often better than NVIDIA) if you hit them with purely static content, but for some reason, when they are faced with dynamic content (particularly textures) they positively svck.

This is not a Rage problem; this problem manifests on ATI hardware all the way back to Quake; it can be tested and confirmed all the way back to Quake, you can write your own benchmarking program that runs on all 3 vendor's hardware and confirm it. ATI loads dynamic textures at runtime at half the speed of Intel and quarter the speed of NVIDIA.

Megatexture giveth and megatexture taketh away. Just like repeating textures, but in different ways.

okay thank you very much for your explanation.. now I understand why this happens.. sounds quiet reasoned.

But what can I do now?
I mean I paid for this game and hit the game requirements.
AtI had months to fix this issue.
Bethesda should give them a kick in the pants!
Even with catalyst 12.2 it does not load the textures fast enough.
Is there anything i can do to make the game playable while iam facing the fact that Ati will possibly never fix this?

If you set in the command line of rage to use 4096x4096 this may help some.
I'm not the expert here, so others may be able to steer you better.

seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 "4096"
seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly "4096"
seta vt_pageimagesizeunique "4096"
seta vt_pageimagesizevmtr "4096"

.. or just set "Texture Cache Size" to "SMALL"?

Strange when I set to large I get better scores in the Rage benchmark.
Small 40/50 large 60/75 this is on a Intel HD graphic laptop, 1st gen.

Texture cache size is more a function of your available video RAM than it is anything affecting performance and/or pop-in. In fact, a larger cache should give you less pop-in as textures won't need to be streamed from disk so often.

My experience on AMD is that a benchmark score of about 60 is sufficient to result in virtually zero pop-in, so that's a good enough initial point to start from.

Next steps would include: if you're using a custom rageconfig.cfg, get rid of it. Kill it. Take it outside and kill it until it is dead. Start Rage in safe mode to ensure that nothing remains. This is particularly true if you're using one of the cfgs that appeared on the web within the first week of the game's launch - these cfgs are snake oil; they contain many settings that do nothing, don't even exist in the game, or attempt to max out inappropriate settings for your hardware.

Having done that, pop into your CCC and ensure that everything is good in that too. If you're forcing any settings in there (particularly AA or AF) drop them back to "use application settings". I believe that Catalyst AI is OK to leave be.

Any atiogl files in your Rage folder should also be killed here.

Having done all that, run Rage normally and select your resolution and texture cache (go for large if you have about 1gb of video RAM, small otherwise) from the menu. Don't go near any of the others yet; right now we're seeing what a stock, untainted Rage install can do. Verify the amount of pop-in you get, then report back and we'll see what the best next steps are.

At first thank you very much for your replies!

Okay.. deleted rage cfg (but dont know how to start in safemode) and iam not forcing anything in ccc not even AI.. forcing it doesnt change anything.
what are those atiogl files? didnt find those in my rage folder.

In game settings everything to low.. no aa texturedetail: small texturecache: large resolution..uhm dont remember something with 1024x... not too high no af ( but I actually didnt changed anything here everything stayed as It was when I started this topic)

But still got very slow loading textures. nothing changed at all..
any further ideas?

thanks for your courage again!

For safe mode you need to edit your Steam launch options - put +set com_safemode 1 in there. Then start Rage, load a game (that may not be necessary but it does no harm), exit and remove com_safemode from your launch options. It's also worth checking to see if you have anything else in the launch options that may be adjusting settings, and removing it if so. You can always save it (copy and paste to Notepad, for example) if you really want to put it back later. Until you do this you're going to some lingering remains from the cfg file that haven't been cleaned out yet.

thank you very much for your answers.. tried it all,
but nothing seems to help..

hope it will be fixed someday.. how awkward ati.. or bethesda/ID... or both.

The problem is you have a dual core cpu. Rage has to transcode the textures in software and if you don't have a cuda enabled gpu it has to use your cpu. If you also only have 512mb vram then you're system is just marginal for gaming to begin with. Other games might slow down and stutter on a weaker computer, but Rage does the texture pop-in instead.

P.S.- 32 bit xp can't be helping either. I'd make sure all the background applications are shut down and try again.

I know But iam hitting the minimum system requirements and every other game runs really fine.
thank you.. already tried to shut down all the background applications..