RAGE Benchmark

RAGE is a first person shooter developed by id and published by Bethesda. RAGE uses id’s id Tech 5 game engine based on OpenGL. Being first announced in 2007, RAGE was one of the most expected games of this year. 4 years later RAGE is available to any FPS | RPG fan.

First thing you notice with RAGE is it’s size, 20GB is a lot even for a 2011 title. The reason is that the game uses very big texture files and this has consequences I will mention later. After entering the game you notice that the Video Settings Menu is very simple, the game only lets you choose resolution and AntiAliasing level. id implemented a auto-detect feature that scans your PC and chooses the right settings.

Forums are filled with complaints about low quality textures, flickering, tearing and low performance. While the game delivers above average graphic detail, when looking closely at objects they are blurred and you can actually see where textures come together, you can see the “stitches”. The flickering and tearing can be fixed by forcing vSync from AMD Catalyst Control Center.

Because textures are so big there is constant HDD activity and this impacts performance with slower hard drives, textures load every time you move the mouse so when a object loads it will continue to load once you look at it again.

Both AMD and Nvidia released performance drivers for RAGE, get them here: AMD Catalyst RAGE Performance Driver Win 7 x32 x64, Nvidia R285 Win 7 x32, Nvidia R285 Win 7 x64.

Operating System Benchmark

Even though XP x32 was the best performing operating system, missing textures were ridiculous, terrain was riddled with “black patches”. Other operating systems performed, looked and felt the same. RAGE failed to start with Windows 8 Developer Preview, something to do with Steam…

Performance with RAGE is hilarious; keeping in mind the graphic detail, there is no excuse for this game performing so bad even on release day. 40 FPS is not nearly enough for a high end computer and, again, for the detail of graphics delivered by RAGE.

Cores Benchmark

	RAGE | CPU Usage
1 Core	100%
2 Cores	100%
3 Cores	~90%
4 Cores	~80%

While a quad core will not bring any performance improvement over a triple core, on 1 and 2 cores RAGE was simply unplayable, the game froze on a regular basis.

Lately, optimization eludes more and more developers, even the best in the industry are attracted to fast profits. RAGE is a technical fiasco at this point. I tried the AMD RAGE Driver only to see a more messed up game. Unless a patch comes really soon, this game is doomed. If some of the issues come from AMD’s drivers we will have to wait at least 2 weeks before 11.10 driver comes out. If RAGE can be saved by gameplay and storyline is a question that only father time will answer…

AMD Catalyst 11.9 vs AMD Catalyst 11.10 Preview v2

Edit: AMD released a Battlefield 3 and RAGE unified driver.

How to Enable High Res Textures

Enabling this will make Rage look crisper thanks to the 8k textures.

1. First you need to edit a configuration file, browse to Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base and open using Notepad the following file: default.cfg.
2. Add the following piece of code to the file:

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4

3. Save the file and enter Rage.

This will enable 8k textures for Rage, you can modify the size of textures by replacing 8192 with anything like:
1024 (1k textures)
2048 (2k textures)
3072 (3k textures)
etc

Just increment with 1024 until you reach desired quality, you can go as high as 16k (16384).

Note: For 8k textures you will need at least 1.5 GB of Video Ram

Credit goes to GeForce.com

Solved almost all problems using this configuration (add to default.cfg):

Click to See the Code

Using AMD Rage Performance Driver I get around 60 FPS on average and 40 when things get very intense, texture pop ins are rare.