Low Rage benchmark

[7beauties]

I'm playing Rage on Steam and within the settings is the option to benchmark my PC. I got a low score of between fair and good, 34 Mega Texels per second. And if I use FRAPS my FPS drops very low and defeats the purpose of game play recording. I'd like to know what that measurement of Mega Texels is and how I can improve performance.

AMD Phenom II 965 3.6Ghz quad core CPU
Asus Crosshair IV Formula Republic of Gamers motherboard
Dual Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards in Crossfire
16GB of DDR 3 1333 system RAM
Sound Blaster Recon3D Fatal1ty Champion sound card
Western Digital 2TB 7,200 RPM HDD
Seagate 2TB 7,200 RPM HDD
950W PC Power & Cooling PSU
Windows 8 Pro

One of my HDD is SATA II and the other SATA III. I can't remember which is my primary. I don't have a RAID array. Steam, my games, and programs are on my primary HDD. The other is just storage. Thank you.

 

[BrightCandle]

Mine gets 155.

All its a measure of as the benchmark says is the conversion of the game textures to something the graphics card can use. NVidia single cards can do this in hardware everything needs to do it in software.

What it impacts is the loading of textures during the game. If you often see low quality textures as you move around the world the reason is this low score, but it doesn't impact the frame rate in any way.

I had considerable problems with Rage and AMD hardware, it would never let me run with vsync on at all, it had like 5 second input lag. With Vsync off I had the worst tearing I have ever seen. I couldn't play it in eyefinity at all. I also couldn't benchmark it, as soon as I tried the game would stutter terribly.

It works fine on NVidia hardware incidentally, in surround as well as normal, with vsync on and off and I had no issues capturing frame rates.

But its Rage that is broken, they released a game relying on features that AMD didn't have ready in their drivers and its never been fixed. There is nothing wrong with your setup, AMD and ID Software made this problem together.

 

[mfenn]

You really have two problems that are working together to give you a bad experience in this instance.

1. As BrightCandle mentioned, Rage relies on some massive texture compression, and Id only bothered to write a hardware-accelerated decompression technique for Nvidia cards. They could certainly do it with OpenCL on AMD cards, they just didn't bother to do so.

2. Since there is no GPU-accelerated decompression option, it has to fall back to the software method which runs on the CPU. You have a Phenom II X4 965, which is not exactly fast by modern standards.

Since you already have a very good GPU, I would say that the best avenue for you to go down would be to upgrade to an i5 3570K + Z77 motherboard. However, I probably wouldn't drop the cash if Rage is the only game that's giving you problems. It's a broken game in many respects and not that fun to boot.