id’s legendary robo-brain John Carmack has broken the developer’s rather inadvisable silence about the mucky state of Rage at launch on PC last week. Apology? Nah? Accepting blame? Nah. It’s all ATI’s fault that id released a game designed for future rather than existent drivers, he says. Oh, and the reason the game, once working, is still not as super-shiny as we might have hoped is because “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.” Here we go again.

In happier news, the first Rage patch is out, and thank the god of textures, it introduces a much-needed graphics settings menu to the game. (more…)

Rage, the first id game since – careful now – Doom 3 – came out on Tuesday in American climes, and is due in the retailer-oppressed UK tomorrow. After initially losing a day to the PC version’s notorious technical problems, which ultimately led to picking up a different graphics card and manually tweaking configuration files, I’ve since been haring my way through its wastelands and tunnels, on foot and on wheels, and I’m ready to offer my verdict. Return to form, exploring new frontiers or compounding age-old problems? Let’s find out, stranger.> (more…)

Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You’ll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it’s reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?

Bethesda echo these and other fixes here.

Why, that’s the most boring headline I’ve ever written here. Still, it’s late, I’m tired, I’ve spent half the day unsuccessfully trying to track down an NVIDIA card so I can play Rage without feeling nauseous, but now I don’t have to because ATI have put out a fix for the unhappy state of the game on Radeons. Unlike the first supposed fix, this makes things better rather than worse. (more…)