And don't forget that id took advice from AMD engineers on what to do, on what would work best. AMD engineers themselves are responsible for Rage's initial support for AMD cards, AMD engineers are responsible for the clusterf--k.

Here we go again.

Fabulous, i'm up to the part where you return to Dead City. Everytime i go to enter the zone, it just crashes using my current setup. Sooo.... seeing as how this is the second time you go to the zone, why does it hate me now?
I tried loading different saves and I also tried loading different zones and then returning to Dead City.... This is stupid. Now on top of playing in chunks of a maximum of 30 minutes, now i can't even continue the game.
Now accepting suggestions for fixes....... cause this really doesnt seem like a driver problem. Why would a driver affect whether or not a "specific" zone loads or not? Stupid problematic game.

Well, first things first, if it's an engine problem then you would expect the problem to happen for other people and on other hardware. The fact that it doesn't points towards the driver, but doesn't conclusively prove it.

So why would a driver crash when re-entering the same zone a second time? Number of reasons, but the first that springs to mind is that there is rather a different bunch of enemies (and some new vehicles that I don't think you'll have seen before) in the second run through. All of these items have geometric data that needs to be loaded on to your GPU - positions, texture coords, vertex normals, etc. They also all have different textures, and these also need to be loaded onto your GPU. Any one of these could be in a format that your driver doesn't like, and we could go back and forth squabbling for positively years over who's responsibility it might be to fix that.

Not helpful in fixing the problem I know, but hopefully it does clarify things a little.

If a driver works with every single other game in the world, except for this one, do you still blame the driver? Your logic depresses me.

It is FOR SURE the fault of AMD. No doubt about it. There is no hotfix for 11.10 that has the blue texture bug!

In my opinion AMD is pissed at id Software probably because they blamed them in the public for having caused the trouble with the 11.9 and the texture pop-in. They could have released a hotfix update. To me it looks like Rage worked till 11.6 and then didn't till 11.10 preview 2. Maybe the blue color is kind of revenge for id Software working with Intel on making Rage work on the integrated Intel HD 3000 of Sandy Bridge CPUs (Carmack talked about this on the Quakecon). AMD has an equivalent technology with their Fusion APUs.

They are layoffs at AMD (they get rid of ~10% employees) . I hope they fire the part of the Catalyst team who is responsible for the Rage situation.

One again the important information is being ignored.

Rage uses OpenGL.
Most other games use Direct3D.

AMD are supposed to have an OpenGL driver that works, but they don't. AMD's OpenGL driver is, in fact, a PoS, and anybody who's ever done any OpenGL programming will confirm that.

Hence: it's the driver.

The fact that AMD themselves have admitted that their driver is at fault confirms this. More important information that's being ignored.

How many times must this be repeated?

Almost every other game used dx drivers. This game uses open gl. ATI has always been bad with open gl drivers.

Bottom line is don't believe anything AMD or ID say at this point - they are both talking out of their arses. Don't believe in any quotes because they are both liars. If you do believe what they say, where is this 'fabled' driver that they were happy in the performance of? I mean the game must have been developed on a driver - one that produced good enough results for a release.

With the [censored] storm that has come out of the release of Rage you would have thought, one of the two would have released the so called driver in the sake of damage limitation, ergo there was no driver that they were happy in the performace of - the talks between ID and AMD engineers are probably still going on in the preliminary phase, they just produced an unfinished game/drivers to tie in with the console release. And we are the guinea pigs.

No one can say its the drivers at fault - or vice versa. its the combination of the game and the drivers available that is causing a [censored] storm.

Personally I have downloaded over 1GB of drivers with this [censored] game, had two installs side by side (patched pre patched) on my 128GB ssd ( say that because its a LOT of space for asmall ssd ) thats how much I hoped that it would work, but I have had enough, its water on a ducks back but I think that I will never own another ATI/ID product again.

Drivers that are suitable for development are not the same as drivers that are suitable for public release.

AMD may have only made a 64-bit Windows 7 version of the fabled driver, for example. They may not have bothered with 32-bit versions or XP/Vista versions. No way can that be released publicly; if nothing else it would start a new round of outcry from 32-bit and/or XP/Vista users.

The driver may have also only contained support for the OpenGL calls that Rage uses. That can't be released publicly either; AMD would be crucified when everything else breaks.

Another possibility is that the driver may have "phoned home" to AMD with crash or error info. Can't release that publicly.

Or it could be a combination of more than one of the above, or something else entirely different.

No, I don't know the truth either; I'm just trying to give people the benefit of the doubt and point out a few examples of why the test driver can't be released publicly.

Thats not the point, the point is that they don't have a driver for any version of windows. If they did it would have been leaked out to minimise the damage both companies are taking at the moment, even if they only had a seven 64bit driver (or any version of windows) that broke everything else - they would release it on the quiet because it makes no difference to 'breaking' other applications as people would just use it in their Rage/Base installation folder so It wouldnt effect anything else. And a whole bunch of 64bit users not moaning that their game does not work is a whole bunch less moaners than the situation has at the moment.

I wouldnt even think that they would care that much as thats exactly what the 'performance/beta' drivers did with a lot of applications (break them). The phone home is a valid point but you could break the call/bool quite easily leaving the rest of the code intact. I'm not argueing - im just giving my two cents.

I guess all anyone can do at the moment is speculate as to what is going on, I still beleive that there are no drivers (development of otherwise) for AMD hardware and probably wont be for a while.

Maybe Id should be using DX instead of open gl? That seems like the original mistake. They chose a platform that is have known for having issues with their own games in the past. Sounds like an id [censored] up to me.

I think the reason id always goes with OpenGL is because Carmack only knows how to program in OGL, the guy is useless otherwise.

I deleted the game. I couldn't get it to work for me, I've never even made it to the car yet (after escaping the arc).

It was a $60 well spent. I look forward to playing it in a year or so when I have a better computer with a Nvidia card.

LOL!! so true

Id tech 5 is API agnostic.

It runs on DX on 360. I runs on open gl ES on ps3. It runs on open gl 3.2 on pc. Its not an id problem, its AMD/ATI problem.

You are wrong. Im sorry, but I cannot confirm ATI OpenGL implementation is that bad. It used to be bad in former days, when they had old things like rage128 in their production line, but now their drivers are ok. Carmack himself made a presentation of Doom3 in ATI's hardware. I did some OpenGL stuff just for fun using ATI and nVidia hw. Let me tell you something. In our industry (im programmer) - product should pass Q&A department before gold status. Q&A tests are close to real - i.e. NO dev drivers, most common hardware. This game is not playable in any combination of ATI's hw + drv. This is clearly ID's + ATI fault,? but not just ATI. Nvidia is also having issues... Whats more - XBox360 is actually having ATI chip. There are no complains about this version, so how is it - ATI is ok in xbox and ATI is not ok in PC?

I don't think anyone is particularly right on this thread and I don't think anyone is wrong either.

The bottom line is the problems are a cluster [censored] of issues from the game (ID), AMD and Nvidia.
Whatever controls were in place to see the game went to a gold build then should have been passed on to the customers.
It would not have been hard to include a baseline message in the install that says you must use driver XYZ / ABC from AMD/Nvidia and until you reach that the game wont install.

That baselines the game to a level ID know it works at.

AMD and Nvidia can then say use that driver.
If updates break it, then it will only look bad for them and would force them to be careful rather than this ambiguous is it the game, is it the driver, is it the hardware and so on.

It's just a shame really that the game feels and looks pretty much like a console port to the PC so regardless of what the drivers and issues are on that side people should be pissed at a half-assed job for PC gamers in general.

No they are not. Their driver broke quake wars every other driver release. Even ATIs support kept confirming it with me over the phone. Nivida issues were fixed in 2 days from rage release with a driver update. ATI has yet to fix their drivers. Id tech 5 is API agnostic. It uses dx 9 in xbox, open gl ES in PS3, and open GL 3.2 in windows. ATI is fine on xbox because its uses DX. Open GL is not fine on PC because because rage uses open GL on PC and ATI open GL drivers svck.

No they are not. Their driver broke quake wars every other driver release. Even ATIs support kept confirming it with me over the phone. Nivida issues were fixed in 2 days from a driver update. ATI has yet to fix their drivers. Id tech 5 is API agnostic. It uses dx 9 in xbox, open gl ES in PS3, and open GL 3.2 in windows. ATI is fine on xbox because its uses DX. Open GL is not fine on PC because because rage uses open GL and ATI open GL drivers svck.

They could have used DX 10, 11, but only only vista and windows 7 users with high end video cards could play the game. Their would be no way for xp, Linux, and mac users to get a port.

They could have used open GL 4 series, but it also needs higher end video cards.

They could have used DX 9, but its outdated, would not run on Mac and Linux, and would not allow for more graphics options id tech 5 supports. That would mean no experimental Rage patches John Carmack was talking about and a serve limit to Doom 3 graphics update.

Id chose open gl 3.2 which was the perfect choice. Its platform agnostic. Its better then DX10 and give or take feature parity with DX11. The best part is unlike open gl 4, and DX 10/11 it scales back to older video cards like Nivida 8800s.

https://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator

This just confirms what a lot of us have been saying from the outset.

I too have programmed in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the one thing that I am more certain of than anything else in this problem domain is that AMD (and Intel too; they also deserve a good kicking here) and OpenGL are not a happy mixture. I personally ended up tossing out a year's worth of work in an OpenGL codebase because AMD and Intel just couldn't get their acts together. That wasn't a decision made lightly and it wasn't influenced by any kind of hating on OpenGL either; the very opposite in fact - I had fully believed all of the anti-D3D propaganda up to that point. But when simple things that should work and are fully compliant with the documentation cause random crashes and mysterious slowdowns, it becomes time to start asking serious questions.

Re: the 360 version of Rage. Of course it works on AMD/ATI hardware; Rage uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA on the 360. That is one huge advantage of consoles: the end-user platform is static, stable and consistent across all machines. D3D can get a bit of this too owing to it's different driver architecture; everyone is on the same end-user runtimes. OpenGL by contrast just provides far too much leeway for drivers to screw up. (And no, the PS3 version doesn't use OpenGL either so don't try pulling that one.)

Final note here. None of this should be read as if I'm completely exonerating id for the mess. There was an obvious decision here that they failed to make, for reasons which may have seemed valid at the time but ended up doing more harm than good. Hindsight is truly wonderful. But saying "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap so don't use OpenGL if you want to run well (or at all) on AMD" doesn't invalidate the core point here, which is the "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap" bit.

I cannot see how so many people are have trouble with this game, It cannot just be a amd/ati problem because I have not had any issues with the game so far and I am running it on a Sapphire 6870 "11.10 drivers", C2D E8500 @3.8ghz and 4gb 800mhz ram.
It HAS to be something else because I am living proof that this cannot be an amd/ati problem, Atleast not with the HD 6000 series anyway.

Its running so [censored] smooth I could cry. Although I did expect it to be a little more..... Open worlded.

As I posted for someone before, I'll post it for you as well:

Id has nothing to do with Skyrim, only RAGE. Skyrim was done by Bethesda's own developers, and was in production long before ZeniMax bought id Software.

Don't compare apples and oranges.

The Ati gpu in the 360 is supported natively by the 360 development system. That means one chip worldwide with the same architecture. And i doubt you even have a pc-like driver for the gpu on the 360 as this additional software layer is obsolete on consoles and destroys rendering speed significantly due to unnecessary function calls and memory management.
Drivers on PC have to make numerous gpus of a vendor compatible and even things out with the OS and the software that's running and there's your problem:

Ati builds wonderful gpus but they have a serious problems when it comes to building a driver release that works on all of their actual graphics cards in conjunction with all possible OSes and games.
This problem gets even worse when native driver support is cancelled and you have to take a unified one instead.
Indeed, my old Ati 1650x worked perfectly with ALL OpenGL games of the last decade with it's original NATIVE driver. When they stopped native support, the misery began. Every openGL game i own started having problems. DirectX always worked perfect. (I do program on DirectX in C++)
So i bought a "new" HD 4650 to get rid of the problem but big mistake.

Looks like Ati constantly ignored openGL as a development plattform as DirectX seemed to be the winner. Nvidia just made a better job there.
And i'm pretty sure it's not a native openGL implementation Rage 360 is running on...

Well allow me to let you know I can run Skyrim perfectly with the only issue being the shadows being rendered by the CPU rather than the GPU. RAGE? No such luck.

Actually, I have no intention to defend ATI. They are probably having lots of issues in their OpenGL 3xx implementation. And Rage is basically the only and the first game utilizing OpenGL 3.xx. Earlier, games were using lower version of OGL api, this was developed and polished years ago, and therefore - relatively stable and bug-free. That's what I wanted to say. NVidia is also having lots of issues in their drivers, but it reacts quicker with patches and new versions. Just trust me, some of them was found by mystelf

Now, I have a feeling we will see no patch until ATI will sort out their problems, just because it has no sense to fix something in the engine code, which is broken in the ATI's driver code. This is not like ATI is not paying attention to its OpenGL part - I would guess it's an ATI's way to develop good 3.xx (and above) driver, which is really different from the GL > 3.0.

And you are right - Xbox360 is not using OpenGL at all.