Installed Rage last night and played until 2 am or probably later, can't remember because I was really tired and just fell sleep. It took me exactly 5 minutes to install the ATI fix and add the cfg settings, and the game ran exactly as advertised, and I have a really out of date system including an ATI card. I can't help but think people aren't doing it right. So far Carmack was right when he said "make sure you install the latest drivers".

I must admit, they screwed the pooch on the textures, and I wish they were better because every minute or so I stop to look at something and go "holy crap is that bad". But the game itself is fun as hell, and the battles are awesome. I honestly think the drama here was overblown because people were impatient.

After reading the forums for two days while waiting for it to unlock, I was 100% that:

-It wasn't going to work at all on my ATI HD 4650.
-It might work after hours and hours of tweaking and breaking other drivers.
-If it worked, it would look like other [censored] and disappoint me horribly.
-Low framerates.

What actually happened:

-It worked right away, but I got texture pop-in.
-It took 5 minutes to install the Performance Driver and add the texture streaming cfg settings for 8k textures, and everything was 100% fixed. Not a single crash yet.
-It looks amazing, but some exceptions.
-Great framerate.

I was very close to cancelling Skyrim and trying to get a refund on Rage. Boy would I have been wrong. Everyone stop it for a second and think, do what the devs tell you and you will have a great game to play. Bethesda/Id are not the devil, I am pretty sure they were facepalming pretty hard when the error reports came in, and they have done nothing but release fixes so far. They are on your side.

So far it's been better than any FPS I've played in a while, except maybe DX:HR, which wasn't a pure FPS, and to be fair that game was in a league of its own when it comes to story telling and design.

My faith in id or Bethesda has not wavered. The world has not imploded. It's just no a 100% score game, but definitely worth playing, and I'm sorry if anybody else was expecting the return of jesus or something.

So if it doesn't run on your machine yet, give it a little while and play something else. You still own the game. Back in 1997 when Quake 2 came out it didn't work right away, and we were all scrambling to get the new Voodoo cards from 3dfx. When Quake 3 came out, many of us couldn't run it perfectly right away, and the same with Doom 3. This is a next gen engine (believe it or not), and you should give it some time, there are many kinks to be ironed, and I'm sure they will slap some better textures on there in the future. I DO wish it wasn't so consolized, but really the mouse smoothing is not nearly as bad as you guys were saying, and there aren't even any checkpoints. I just wish it had been better optimized for PCs, and not ported from a lesser platform to the better one, but that is really too much to ask for these days.

I'm also quite happy with how the brits took the unlocking last night both on the Steam forums and here. Unlike the Americans with their unwarranted sense of entitlement, they didn't lose their [censored] when the game crashed once or twice or didn't work right away. :foodndrink:

Yeah, people like to blow [censored] out of proportion. No matter how good a game is, people still complain. Glad it works good for you.

I agree. After it unlocked itself this morning I started the game and I had texture pop-in but I was still on my original ATI drivers (11.8 on and HD 4890) so I downloaded a couple of community made fixes and still had it so I downloaded the newest ATI drivers. Started the game again and I had the chequerboard effect, so I enables Catalyst AI and it runs great now!

Yeah, if you go right up to walls the textures look muddy but I am not a grafix-[censored] so doesn't bother me. I am glad it runs but I am not glad that I listened to the haters and cancelled my retail pre-order which was saving me ￡6 as I eventually bought off Steam as I just had to know if the game would run.

Glad I did great game so far!

After I removed the Radeon HG 6850 graphics card installed an Nvidia GTX 460, that I had on hand, the game ran great. The textures and scenery were fantastic. The game play was great. The only thing I noticed was sometime a characters dialog would continued after their lips stopped moving. With the Radeon card installed I had the same problems with tearing, game freezing and CTDs that have been reported by others on the different forums. The drivers I'm using on the Nvidia card are from 8/11.

The only problems I've had with the game, and I've played it all the way through, is controlling the vehicles with a keyboard. The vehicle response is very touchy and hard to control.

I think id has a great game here. As soon as I finish this post I intend to start the game again an do all of the side missions. Thank you Mr. Cormack for all of the fun.