RAGE: How to optimise HDD accessing "megatextures"

[lavaheadache]

I'm currently playing through Rage and enjoying it quite a bit.

There is a ton of HDD activity while playing the game due to the way textures are streamed from the HDD.

How do I go about, or is there a solution to a better caching system that any of you fine people have done to smooth out the texture streaming?

I'm currently using an HD4870 1 gig card and it pretty much rips through the game fine.

I have read that the game is supposed to set up a file to read from but the developers forgot to have the game create the file.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Elcs]

Probably Windows Indexing is the best solution I could think of.

Drawing a parallel from Fallen Earth, it had a certain file which required a lot of hard drive activity, becoming especially bad around towns and cities. Setting Windows Indexing to index the very folder it was located in (For Ex: C:\Fallen Earth\GUI\Towns\Annoying Files\).

This solution greatly improved performance in these areas, I guess as Windows knew exactly where to look when the game told it to read that file.

 

[Childs]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ryK2PErQQc#t1m18s

if you search for the official rage thread in this forum, there maybe more info. Search seems to be broken at the moment.

 

[Corporate Thug]

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2156408

Find the .cfg for your card and drop it in the appropriate folder. Really helped in my experience. the texture issue isn't bad at all now.

 

[Corporate Thug]

check out this thread for a lot of good tips:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2216651

 

[shortylickens]

I know some guys who keep their favorite one or two games on a small cheap SSD.

 

[lavaheadache]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ryK2PErQQc#t1m18s

if you search for the official rage thread in this forum, there maybe more info. Search seems to be broken at the moment.

thanks for this vid. Helped a lot

 

[lavaheadache]

I know some guys who keep their favorite one or two games on a small cheap SSD.

not a bad idea.

 

[wuliheron]

not a bad idea.

Its especially good for a few games like Rage and Fallout NV that can page the HDD a lot and stutter or whatever. Any SSD is way faster then a HDD, but if you have windows 7 you might want to buy one with trim support.

 

[Corporate Thug]

I know some guys who keep their favorite one or two games on a small cheap SSD.

how would that work? would there be 2 steam installs? one on the primary with all the games and a second on the SSD with the select few?

 

[stahlhart]

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2156408

Find the .cfg for your card and drop it in the appropriate folder. Really helped in my experience. the texture issue isn't bad at all now.

Runs smooth as silk here with the 1Gb version of the .CFG in this thread. I was going to try the C: cache option next, but don't see any need to now.

Running GTX560Ti SLI (Rage ignores the second card, but at least I don't have to disable SLI).

 

[Aikouka]

how would that work? would there be 2 steam installs? one on the primary with all the games and a second on the SSD with the select few?

Create a symbolic link from the current steam install (on the hard drive) to a solid state drive that contains the files for the game you want to speed up.

http://www.windows7home.net/how-to-create-symbolic-link-in-windows-7/

So, for rage, you would move...

<Steam Install Location>\steamapps\common\rage\virtualtextures\*.*

to a SSD

then do MKLINK /D virtualtextures <SSD Location>

The MKLINK command is performed at the rage directory level. Essentially, it's almost like creating a shortcut that the OS sees as a legit folder.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Create a symbolic link from the current steam install (on the hard drive) to a solid state drive that contains the files for the game you want to speed up.

http://www.windows7home.net/how-to-create-symbolic-link-in-windows-7/

So, for rage, you would move...

<Steam Install Location>\steamapps\common\rage\virtualtextures\*.*

to a SSD

then do MKLINK /D virtualtextures <SSD Location>

The MKLINK command is performed at the rage directory level. Essentially, it's almost like creating a shortcut that the OS sees as a legit folder.

awesome, thanks. So you would only need to add the virtualtextures folder to the ssd and not the whole rage folder if I understand correctly.

 

[Aikouka]

awesome, thanks. So you would only need to add the virtualtextures folder to the ssd and not the whole rage folder if I understand correctly.

You can create a symbolic link for a file or directory, which means you can move around however much you want. Some people may prefer moving the whole rage folder for simplicity.

 

[Raduque]

Rage's performance and texture loading/pop-in appear to be fine on my system (C2D e8400 @ 3.6ghz, 6gb ram, GTX460GC 768), but my main issue is with the overall blurryness of the textures.

I'm using the cfg file that sets everything to 8k for textures, and where most games 8192x8192 textures would be extremely sharp and high quality, in Rage, it looks like using 64x64 textures in a game from 1996.

 

[wuliheron]

Rage's performance and texture loading/pop-in appear to be fine on my system (C2D e8400 @ 3.6ghz, 6gb ram, GTX460GC 768), but my main issue is with the overall blurryness of the textures.

I'm using the cfg file that sets everything to 8k for textures, and where most games 8192x8192 textures would be extremely sharp and high quality, in Rage, it looks like using 64x64 textures in a game from 1996.

You'd need at least 1.5gb of vram to get higher resolution textures. It should be interesting to see what the id tech 5 can do with something like the upcoming radeon 6990 with 6gb vram.

However, I saw a noticeable improvement when I installed the latest 12.1 preview driver and enabled crossfire on my 2 radeon 5850s. It could be even the slightest drop in fps affects the texture resolution noticeably.

 

[Soccerman06]

Ramdisk that thing, ram > ssd

 

[kylebisme]

It should be interesting to see what the id tech 5 can do with something like the upcoming radeon 6990 with 6gb vram.

Texture wise, no better than a single GPU card with 3GB of VRAM, and more VRAM will only help loading in higher detail in the distance, were the 8k setting already does a respectable job on current cards. It's the up close detail that's lacking in Tech 5, and notably improving that would require making the game use ~4x more disk space.

 

[wuliheron]

Texture wise, no better than a single GPU card with 3GB of VRAM, and more VRAM will only help loading in higher detail in the distance, were the 8k setting already does a respectable job on current cards. It's the up close detail that's lacking in Tech 5, and notably improving that would require making the game use ~4x more disk space.

That's not the engine, but the game itself. Carmack hinted last summer they might produce a 75gb texture pack, but that's at least 10 DVDs making bluray and high speed internet the only viable distribution channels. Between that and the limited number of people with 1.5gb video cards we might have to wait for Doom 4 or even Quake to be released, but it will happen eventually.

 

[biostud]

it's even easer to manage steam games on a SSD with steam mover

http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

 

[lavaheadache]

it's even easer to manage steam games on a SSD with steam mover

http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

Create a symbolic link from the current steam install (on the hard drive) to a solid state drive that contains the files for the game you want to speed up.

http://www.windows7home.net/how-to-create-symbolic-link-in-windows-7/

So, for rage, you would move...

<Steam Install Location>\steamapps\common\rage\virtualtextures\*.*

to a SSD

then do MKLINK /D virtualtextures <SSD Location>

The MKLINK command is performed at the rage directory level. Essentially, it's almost like creating a shortcut that the OS sees as a legit folder.

Thanks,


This thread has proven very useful.

I've learned a few things I didn't know about

 

[Aikouka]

Ramdisk that thing, ram > ssd

Finally a use for SB-E's quad memory channel?

 

[Dankk]

Carmack hinted last summer they might produce a 75gb texture pack, but that's at least 10 DVDs making bluray and high speed internet the only viable distribution channels. Between that and the limited number of people with 1.5gb video cards we might have to wait for Doom 4 or even Quake to be released, but it will happen eventually.

I wouldn't rule out Bittorrent as a viable distribution method. I've downloaded files 20+ GB in size this way, whereas hosting the same files traditionally on a server wouldn't be viable because of ludicrous bandwidth cost.

My 6950 is only 1gb Kinda makes me wish I had a 2gb card.

 

[Soccerman06]

Finally a use for SB-E's quad memory channel?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130624

128GB supported memory, I laugh at your 75GB texture pack.

If only I could afford $2400 to spend on that much ram.

 

[wuliheron]

Finally a use for SB-E's quad memory channel?

Not unless you have more money then sense. Rage can get by with as little as 2gb of dual channel ram and quadrupling that to 8gb certainly wouldn't require quad channel. At best quad channel might help reduce some texture popping caused by paging the hard drive. Your money would be better spent on a more powerful video card with more vram.