First off, my system:

AMD Phenom II X6 1075T (3.0ghz)
G.Skill DDR3-1333 RAM (8gb)
2x EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW (core overclocked to 850mhz, 2gb VRAM each [4gb total], SLI)

Everything below has been attempted on 296.10 and 301.24 Nvidia drivers. Also, RAGE is up to date via Steam.

I installed RAGE for the first time last night. Once up and running, I cranked everything to max in the Video settings menu and went for a spin. Four hours later, I had noticed a few issues.

One, as many have mentioned, is the persistence of blurry textures when higher res ones should be present.

Two, and really more the point of this post, is that when I switch from indoors to out, the level loads quickly enough but then the game drops to 1 or 2fps, literally, while what appears to be more texture loading goes on. It stays that way for a variable amount of time, but never less than 4 or 5 minutes, until it snaps to and everything runs smoothly from there on out.

This seems to occur every time I switch environments. When I leave a city or a "dungeon" out in the wastes, when I start a race in Wellspring, etc. It never happens when going from outdoors to in, however.

So, in an effort to solve this problem, I got to searching. I discovered how many problems others had been having and implemented a few attempts for myself. Among them, I created the cache directory under AppData and directed rageconfig.cfg to it. Indeed, it created the 1gb file and a smaller one.

However, I've yet to solve the problem. Still, every time I leave a smaller level, I've got a 5-10 minute waiting period before the game becomes playable. Further, I discovered that, even with my hardware being what it is, if I force 8k textures via the config file, the game will crash almost immediately with the Nvidia driver complaining that it's lost connection to the OpenGL context.

All that said, my two questions are 1) How do I solve the incredible post-loading loading time of the outdoor level and 2) why does my machine crash when attempting to force 8k textures?

Try disabling one of the cards. Perhaps Rage doesn't like SLI.

Thanks for the tip. I looked to my Nvidia control panel tonight and it seems SLI was disabled by some flook sometime between my last driver install and now. So, I ran RAGE and it locked up while loading my last save. I decided maybe I'd screwed around with too many settings so tried started a new game. It worked, but even inside the Ark I was getting the same 1-2fps.

So I deleted the config file (previously I had just commented every line out) and deleted the cache directory and tried running it again. This time, my old save loaded, but when I exited Wellspring, I got the same 2fps. I dropped out, enabled SLI, and tried again. This time, the game slowly hung as I turned around (attempting to load textures again).

So, I've disabled SLI, but I still get laughable frame rates. Also, it appears SLI has gotten buggier since a few days ago, haha.

Have you gave this a try: removing any rage configs that you might have made, start the game with http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1360602-is-the-stuttering-ever-gonna-be-fixed/page__p__20522216#entry20522216 +set com_safemode 1
play it if it will allow you to, some, then remove the safe mode command then see if it will work correct.

Edit: its a PITA, but you could remove one of the video cards and then you could enable http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1346257-gpu-transcode-is-sli-muti-video-card-related/ and the game should play way better with a single video card.

"SLI Ready Systems GPU Transcode does not work" its a known issue that no one seems to want to fix!
id software should have to refund everyones money that owns a SLI ready system since they have not got this problem fixed.

Heh, interesting.

I switched over to Nvidia cards years ago when I was forced to give up on ATI for their chronically awful Linux drivers. Seems like Carmack has used OpenGL to discover where Nvidia is falling short on the Windows platform. D= Oh the joys.

I'll give that safemode thing a shot. And hell. Maybe I'll get bored this weekend and pluck one of the video cards out.

Thanks for the advice. =)

I seen a big difference in game play by removing one of my GTX480's then enabling GPU Transcode.
Game was so much smoother I thought I was playing a totally different game.