Still seeing alot of ppl with troubles so I thought I'd just list the things that workd for me real fast in one place.

1) Get the newest rage drivers from amd. uninstall your old ones and install those.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

2) create the rage cache file under - C:/users/"your_name"/appdata/local/id software/rage - (you will probable have to make the id software folder with the rage one inside of that and as such they will be empty for the moment but the game will fill them will temp files)

3) add the Rageconfig.cfg file under C:/programfiles/steam/"YOURsteamID"/steamapps/common/rage/base - using a simple txt editor.
see it here \/ - might have to make some small teaks to the first line depending on hardware, if your graphics card is one Gig or lower leave it.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1237580-the-best-fix-at-the-moment/

4) Once all this was done I had to turn off the Antistropic Filtering in Catalyst Control Center or Vision Engine Center, or rather set it to use app settings to get rid of some weird lines in the txtures and set the Anti Aliasing to either enhance app settings or overwrite app settings, which raised my fps significantly.

And voila! the game runs like butter on my HD 6950.
the only thing I'm still getting is minor artifacting on like 3 ppl in wellspring.

Hope this helps some of my fellow ATI users out there! Good luck brother gamers!
It really is fun once you get it up to snuff!

It seems like everyone is having problems with the artifacting character animations the first time they get to Wellspring. Seems like a bug that id needs to fix.

It's not ID actually, its the drivers. For instance AMD 11.8, no issues with wonky NPC's; however, with RagePerf lots of wonky NPC's especially while in a menu i.e. buying or selling stuff.

so does it run alright with 11.8? or do you still get all the other crazy glitches?

well, did this and now all my saves are bad....lol

i was about 30 mins in with horrid performance on my 5870, constant crashing when zoning, so I don't mind restarting when we get a patch.

I'll tell ya what, it would be really blanking nice if ATI/ID released a patch for this weekend. Can't play much during the work week anyway....I can't remember the last time I had this many problems with a game, and I play almost all titles on PC. I'm used to having to tweak and messing around a bit, no bother at all, but this is just ridiuclous. I expect this from most devs, not id software. Still love them to death, but i'm scratching my head in amazment like a chimp.