So, I wonder if the stuttering is ever gonna be fixed, 'cause it's been a major pain in the ass, and quite frankly, it just makes the game unplayable to me and many others who have this issue.

My rig is pretty beast, I defrag my HD every week with Ultimate Defrag and I've reinstalled the game and deleted all the 'rageConfig' and Steam launch options BS, and I'm still stuttering every two seconds or so, so it's not that.

Other issues worth mentioning:

- Aside from the Stuttering, micro-stuttering.

- Menus are pretty jerky.

- Input lag (mouse lag) on menus.

- Mouse sensitivity goes crazy on pop up messages.

- Rage will message you about achievements being disabled due to the console being enabled even though it ain't.


My specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz (OC)
Memory: G.Skill RipJawsX 8GB (2x4GB)
Grapgics Card: AMD/ATI XFX Radeon 6970 (OC)
HDD: One 1TB C. Black and one 500GB C. Blue
SSD: 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000W
Case: Cooler Master HAF X
Cooling: Corsair A70
Keyboard: Thermaltake Tt eSPORTS Challenger Pro
Mouse: Logitech G500

What exactly are you running Rage off of? If your HDD is one of the old serial-cable models then you can expect massive hits to your performance on a regular basis.

You gotta be kidding me, It's a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black, it's right above you dude..

Give this a try if you haven't already.

thanks, but I've done that a few times already, even after reinstalling the game.

It's incredibly difficult to say what's happening here. The stuttering you experience is definitely not something that everyone is experiencing, so we're dealing with a localized problem that may be only happening on the machine it's being experienced on. Tough to fix something if you can't reproduce it and have no idea what's causing it.

The only things I can think to suggest are to check your CCC for any forced settings, and try reverting to factory clocks.

In-game settings? 'Smart' VSync doesn't seem to play nice.

I have nearly one hundred games on my Steam library and still am yet to experience this much stutter in any other game besides Rage and Fallout, where this kind of problem is even more common and reoccurring, good thing though with have Nexus to fix what the developers couldn't in Fallout. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Rage, so it's definitely game specific and not my machine.

Concerning CCC, there are no forced settings, everything is set to 'use application settings', so I guess you can rule that out too, actually after all that I suppose it's safe to conclude that it ain't my machine but Rage, my guess is that Rage has problems with certain set ups, I've seen many posts with 6xxx owners experiencing stuttering and other common Rage specific ATI/AMD problems.

V-Sync is off.

My guess is your Ati gpu/ driver.
The problems you describe are common with id's OpenGL games and Ati drivers in conjunction with certain gpu generations over the last few years.
Had the same problems with Doom3 and Quake4.
Especially the microstuttering you describe and later on even random crashing. Found several posts about this spread widely over the internet.

I could fix this with Doom3 and Quake 4 by setting the cvar "com_precisetic" from the default 1 to 0 and force the Vsync in my graphics card options to "on" which leads to both games running at 60 frames per second without any microstuttering.

If Rage still has that option despite running on a newer version engine, you could give it a try.

And as Jimmy already stated: try setting your clockspeeds to default. Overclocking can severly REDUCE performance if driver related copying operations get out of sync.
This is no joke. Rage seems to be very sensitive to synchronization problems as it permanently streams data from main to graphics memory.

Btw.: I own the Ati HD4650 which is known for having similar problems as the HD 6xxx series.

My drivers are up to date, and I won't downgrade just because of one game.

Forcing V-Sync on doesn't do jack [censored].

It ain't that.

Are you sure? Have you tried it?

I didn't say anything about downgrading. I just said it might be related to your drivers. In fact you might not even have the option of downgrading but just the option of changing your gpu card from Ati to Nvidia to get rid of this problem as Ati's drivers svck at OpenGL.

Switching on Vsync is just one part of the trick. In fact switching on Vsync just limits framerate to the actual screen refresh rate which prevents stuttering IF the engine is running unlimited which in Doom3 is achieved by setting com_precisetick to 0.
Without setting this cvar to 0, switching on Vsync doesn't do anything.

Really?

Yes.

I've been monitoring the game for a while and found that Rage is only using about 33% of my GPU and about 37 of it's memory, CPU is at approximately 34%.
What's up with that? I pretty much max up all my hardware when playing Metro 2033 for example.

That's just a good thing. It means less noise, heat and power consumption from your video card.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/4526/ragespecs.png 100% either - it's a very light game on the GPU side, though very CPU limited and possibly limited by the PCIe aswell.

Just wondering what you did to uncap the FPS?

Edit: don't know if this is related to the problem here, but I've noticed loss of frame rate and some shuttering on my laptop. see sig for details
This only seems to happen when the CPU is not taxied enough. The game doesn't seem to keep the 2630QM at a high
rate on Mhz. It can jump around from 800Mhz to 2.6Ghz or more. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to lock the CPU
at a single speed at all times. When the game keeps the CPU up in the 2Ghz area it plays without any of those effects.

Some say ThrottleStop fixes this problem but so far with my testing it hasn't for me. Maybe I'm not setting something right.

First of all, you don't want to uncap the framerate as the game-time is syncronized to the framerate rather than real-time. So at 120 fps the game runs at 2X actual speed.
Anyways, what you need to do is grab an *.exe of an unpatched version of the game (google "rage unpatch zip multiupload.com"), backup the Steam *.exe and put the unpatched *.exe in the steam "Rage" folder.
Launch the game and open the command console and type "cvaradd com_synctotime -1".


As for the CPU throttling, I have no idea how change that for your CPU.
I'm pretty sure your laptop would have some kind of "Intel control panel" where you can disable power saving and/or set a constant frequency.

Thanks for the info, I already have the unpatched version stored, but don't really care to run above 60FPS, just saw your SS said you was at over 100FPS.
I may give it a try one day when I have nothing better to do. lol

There are a couple programs pre-installed but neither of those with all the changes I have made will stop the throttling. Power4Gear and the stock power options.
But its a known issue with a lot of the G series from Asus, supposable ThrottleStop helped fix this by run it with some settings, but no luck for me.

There's also a command called "cvaradd rs_showResolutionChanges" which is primarily designed for showing what level the dynamic resolution scaler is at (dynamic resolution is only enabled on PS3 and Xbox360, but can be enabled on PC aswell), but it will also display with the GPU time was for the current frame.

Although the value it displays seems to be somewhat incorrect. Perhaps it's only consdering a certain portion of the actual frame time.