hello,

I recently got Rage through steam. Game works well for the most part but the disk is continually being accessed with any movement. While turning or walking in the game the HDD runs constantly and would only stop if character stops moving. This also happens in the sewers and smaller rooms. Is this expected? I realize the massive texture sizes being processed here, but this continuous disk access leads to skips while playing and puts an unnecessary stress on the disk. This problem occurs with any graphical setting in Rage.

specs below:
Windows 7 64bit
Radeon HD 7970 3GB (with 12.3 Catalyst drivers)
Intel i7 3930K processor
16GB RAM
Rage is on a WD Sata III (6Gb/sec) disk, Windows is on a Sata II (3Gb/sec) Seagate disk. Disks are not encrypted or compressed.
Typical game settings: 1920x1080, full screen, 4x antialiasing, vsync off, large texture cache, high texture anisotropy, texture quality on.
No custom config files or startup options used.

As far as i remember, John Carmack said something about the caching strategy used in Rage in one of his speeches stating that the game searches for texturedata to be displayed in the following order:

1. Video memory
2. Main memory
3. Disk cache
4.HDD

Means if data for rendering the frame is not present in the first memory section, the game will check the second and then the third and the fourth which has least priority.
Since you have 16 GB of main memory installed, hdd access should be rare.

It is not to be expected that Rage permanently runs from your hdd on your system unless there's some memory management problem related to drivers and/or OS cache settings.

But i can't really give you any advice here as i don't own the pc version. My guess aside from mentioned problems would be software running in the background like virus scanners, etc.

Another possible cause is using 16k textures; it's possible that 8k textures may also cause it depending on your video RAM.

The way it works is that - with sufficiently high texture sizes and with sufficiently high AA - your video RAM is already close to the limit. Remember that textures aren't the only thing stored in there; it will also be storing a good chunk of data from in particular vertex and index buffers, render targets and the default framebuffer, and with AA cranked up those last two especially are going to consume a good chunk of it.

The first fallback is system RAM, but as it's a 32-bit app you've got a hard limit of 2gb in userland there. That's going to soon get exhausted as it will be also used for other stuff in the game.

From there we go to disk of some kind, and hence the constant disk accesses.

So until the 64-bit exe is considered stable enough for general consumption that's pretty much expected behaviour.

AV is a good tip; I've added .resources, .streamed, .pagelines and .pages to the excluded file types list in my own AV setup and it definitely gives smoother performance. It won't reduce the disk accesses, but it will help with reducing the amount of CPU-side processing that needs to be done when those accesses do happen.

@Jimmy Shelter

32 bit app have reach of 3GB System RAM.

With Large Address Aware it can be extended to 4GB of System RAM.

Nope, 2gb. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff556232%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Thanks for the replies.

I do not have anti-virus running in the background. Even with very low graphics settings (no AA, no quality textures, small texture cache, low texture anisotropy) the constant HDD access still occurs. Maybe it is the indexing but only the documents folder is being indexed and it is not in the Windows disk. It is like the video card memory is not being used at all.

From the tests that I've done, there is still skipping or performance spikes (drops) even when the entire megatexture is stored directly in RAM (I tried copying a single megatexture into a ram-drive and redirecting the vt_filePath, aswell as making sure there was zero HDD activity).

Without any professional technical knowledge of whats going on, my guess is it's either related to the CPU being stressed too hard, or the fact that the application forces itself to run with CPU priority set as "Lowest".



Edit: As for the constant read/write - this is due to the virtual texture not being big enough [resolution] to support all the requested texture fractions (technically called 'texture pages', but people often get this mixed up with the windows pagefile which is a different thing), and then has to constantly unload texture fractions currently not used in the game frame and replace them [load in] the needed pages.

Ooops. Forgot about Rage still being 32bits. Saw Win7 64 bits, 16 GB ram and thought it should work....

Just an update. Its not the AMD card.

I tried an older Nvidia 8800GTS 512 card (plus latest Nvidia drivers) and Rage had the same issue with the constant disk access while moving or turning (lowest graphics settings - 1920x1080 res). So most likely it is not the AMD card, or its drivers. Besides the AMD card works perfectly with other OpenGL applications and games.

I contacted Bethesda support but so far all their solutions do not work. I logged my computer while running Rage with process monitor and the .pages and .resources files are the ones being accessed the most. wasteland1.pages was read 21000 times in less than 5 minutes of just moving.

I will keep investigating and talking to Bethesda. After 30 years of gaming this is the only game that I cant get to work properly. Hopefully the 64 bit version, if it is ever released, should address this issue.

do you have the folder : C:\Users\login_name\AppData\Local\id software\rage ?
game does not create it sometimes , it has a 1 Go file for swapping
for the rest may be your drive is very fragged and need a defrag , this one is cool : Defraggler

If you have the 3 GB card I suggest you set the virtual texture size to 16384 x 16384

I have tested with and without the appdata folder. It creates the files but the problem persists. I also have tested the 16K and 8K resolution textures using a config file but it makes no difference. Even running at the lowest possible resolution did nothing. Drives are defragmented weekly. I even redownloaded Rage and there was no effect on the problem.

I read many forum posts about Rage problems and my particular issue is not mentioned by anyone. Most refer to the texture popping and, even with the constant HD access, is not really noticeable in my case. Maybe something is damaged in Windows and a complete re-installation is the only option left.

Thanks for the tips.

If it really bothers you that there is much drive activity, it's because of the drive the cache file is located. Maybe set up a 1,5 GB RAM-drive and redirect the cache file there.
Harddrive activity should be pretty much 0% once the pages have been loaded into the cache.

once a week is may be too much but you may be a steam-user.... and valve is always updating its gcf ...
if i were you i would low-level format the drive with : HDDGURU: HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool

it will seriously check the drive and repair it ;']
may be you can also install one win7 per drive , so you defrag better the non-used one and you ll be able to LLF .

have a look before all that if your drives have a firmware update