RAGE textures look like crap with max settings?

[Phynaz]

The id tech 5 was designed specifically to make it easy to train artists and others which also makes it easy to lay them off once the work is complete. That's precisely what they did once the work was complete and Rage was released. They may have more employees then they used to, but a lot of them are contract workers who have little say in the company and the original core group of independent developers still maintains significant control over the company.

I specifically said they have nearly 300 employees, not contractors.

You know Id is owned by Zenemax Media now, right?

 

[NoSoup4You]

I specifically said they have nearly 300 employees, not contractors.

You know Id is owned by Zenemax Media now, right?

Don't confuse him with the facts.

 

[wuliheron]

I specifically said they have nearly 300 employees, not contractors.

You know Id is owned by Zenemax Media now, right?

Zenimax is one of the smaller publishers and their agreement with id is that it will remain an independent studio under the direction of Carmack. That alone says it all. The original group wanted to retain control even as they found it necessary to double the size of the company to use the id tech 5. All this inference people keep making about id now being controlled by Zenimax just doesn't stand up.

Likewise, I suspect your figure of 300 employees is an exaggeration. Last August Carmack stated at Quakecon they have "over 200" employees and with the recently well publicized layoffs I'm sure its nowhere near 300.

 

[wuliheron]

Don't confuse him with the facts.

The fact is Carmack retains control of the company and all the hemming and hawing about Zenimax and "300" employees doesn't change a thing. Its so much blue smoke and mirrors. Innuendo and rumors that belong right up there with all the conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and aliens landing in area 51.

 

[wuliheron]

Who are you trusting here exactly? Cite your sources if you actually have any. Regardless, I made a thread on this subject over at B3D.

Try Camarck's own Quakecon keynote address last August. He clearly states that people with multiple gigabyte video cards can use higher resolution textures, that the uncompressed source code for Rage is roughly 1TB of mostly textures, and that he had to struggle to get the textures to load fast enough as it was.

 

[AdamK47]

I think it's a good game. It has it's problems inherent to the megatexturing Carmack went with, but it's not absolutely horrible. After fixing the microstuttering and the hyperthreading "hitching" problem, I've been getting very smooth framerates with 16K textures. All that was added to the rageconfig.cfg file was the following:

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 16384
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 16384
vt_pageimagesizeunique 16384
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 16384
vt_restart

Fixed 98% of the texture streaming problems and things look fantastic at a distance. Not so much up close. There's no way to fix that.

 

[wuliheron]

I think it's a good game. It has it's problems inherent to the megatexturing Carmack went with, but it's not absolutely horrible. After fixing the microstuttering and the hyperthreading "hitching" problem, I've been getting very smooth framerates with 16K textures. All that was added to the rageconfig.cfg file was the following:

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 16384
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 16384
vt_pageimagesizeunique 16384
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 16384
vt_restart

Fixed 98% of the texture streaming problems and things look fantastic at a distance. Not so much up close. There's no way to fix that.

You can actually only get 16k textures in a few places like Wellspring. Elsewhere you're just forcing 8k textures.

 

[zinfamous]

I don't get it guys - I put a custom rageconfig.cfg file into the directory and filled it with maxed out settings from the page below, but the textures still look like crap on dual Radeon 5870's. What am I doing wrong?

Config site:
http://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/rage/

OP: look in the distance: lovely textures!

Just ignore everything up close.

problem solved.

:sneaky:

 

[coldmeat]

This game is shit

- texture pop in every single time I turn
- mouse sensitivity is through the roof in menus
- intro movies are way too long
- no graphics settings
- terrible textures

And I'm not even an hour into the game.

Did they even play it before release?

 

[wuliheron]

OP: look in the distance: lovely textures!

Just ignore everything up close.

problem solved.

:sneaky:

Or if you are farsighted, take your glasses off.

 

[wuliheron]

This game is shit

- texture pop in every single time I turn
- mouse sensitivity is through the roof in menus
- intro movies are way too long
- no graphics settings
- terrible textures

And I'm not even an hour into the game.

Did they even play it before release?

Sounds like you need a driver update.

In steam right click on Rage, select properties, and add the following to your launch options:

+set com_skipIntroVideo

 

[coldmeat]

Sounds like you need a driver update.

In steam right click on Rage, select properties, and add the following to your launch options:

+set com_skipIntroVideo

I did update my drivers and I still get really bad texture pop in. It's not as bad as it was at first but it's still pretty bad.

I suppose this is because it was developed for consoles and slow turning speed with controllers.

 

[wuliheron]

I did update my drivers and I still get really bad texture pop in. It's not as bad as it was at first but it's still pretty bad.

I suppose this is because it was developed for consoles and slow turning speed with controllers.

The game runs rock solid on PC with so little texture pop-in you really have to pay attention to spot it. It can be caused by any number of things including a slow 5,400rpm hard drive or shortage of vram. Give us some details on your system and maybe we can help.

 

[coldmeat]

The game runs rock solid on PC with so little texture pop-in you really have to pay attention to spot it. It can be caused by any number of things including a slow 5,400rpm hard drive or shortage of vram. Give us some details on your system and maybe we can help.

It happened when I turned fast. Only the textures I was looking at would load.

I used the cfg fix and it seems to have kind of solved it. When I load a new area though, I need to spin around 360 to load all the of the textures or else I will see the pop in again.

my specs btw are
Q6600 @ 3.0ghz
GTX460 1gb
4gb ram
Win7 64

It seems to run fine now, after a number of tweaks and fixes. The mouse sensitivity is still way too high in menus though.

 

[wuliheron]

It seems to run fine now, after a number of tweaks and fixes. The mouse sensitivity is still way too high in menus though.

You might try the gpu transcoding option to take the pressure off your cpu and reduce texture pop-in. The mouse sensitivity is a minor program bug that should be fixed with the upcoming patch.

 

[hardhat]

It was developed for consoles, but I don't think the texture pop in is as bad there because consoles have shared memory for the cpu and gpu portions, and hence less latency during streaming. RAGE has much more CPU texture processing then most games going on, which fits consoles very nicely because of their weak gpu's. I wonder how well RAGE runs on llano?

 

[wuliheron]

It was developed for consoles, but I don't think the texture pop in is as bad there because consoles have shared memory for the cpu and gpu portions, and hence less latency during streaming. RAGE has much more CPU texture processing then most games going on, which fits consoles very nicely because of their weak gpu's. I wonder how well RAGE runs on llano?

It wasn't just developed for consoles and most of the problems on PC are driver related. OpenGL drivers are just harder to write then Dx and AMD seems to have totally dropped the ball this time around. The first driver they released wasn't even the right one and they just made the same mistake with the first driver they released for another game. It's like somebody's drunk or clueless and needs to be fired.

 

[kylebisme]

Try Camarck's own Quakecon keynote address last August. He clearly states that people with multiple gigabyte video cards can use higher resolution textures, that the uncompressed source code for Rage is roughly 1TB of mostly textures, and that he had to struggle to get the textures to load fast enough as it was.

I listned to Carmack's keynote back when it happened, and he's referring to the 8k and 16k page image settings, all the source art that's layered into the MegaTextures in uncompressed format, and issues working through the abstraction layers in windows.

Try reading the responses the B3D thread I started and the linked info there, and you'll see how wrong your understanding of this topic is, and how I was wrong too. Relpacing Rage's MegaTexures wouldn't require any more VRAM at all, not even the little bit for up close surfaces I had figured.

You can actually only get 16k textures in a few places like Wellspring. Elsewhere you're just forcing 8k textures.

No, the page image settings effect how the game is rendered, regardless of location.

 

[wuliheron]

I listned to Carmack's keynote back when it happened, and he's referring to the 8k and 16k page image settings, all the source art that's layered into the MegaTextures in uncompressed format, and issues working through the abstraction layers in windows.

Try reading the responses the B3D thread I started and the linked info there, and you'll see how wrong your understanding of this topic is, and how I was wrong too. Relpacing Rage's MegaTexures wouldn't require any more VRAM at all, not even the little bit for up close surfaces I had figured.

No, the page image settings effect how the game is rendered, regardless of location.

I still think this is a fantasy. Id used a render farm to bake some of the special effects right into the textures and from the way Carmack was talking he did 12 kinds of yoga, 20 kinds of kung fu, and quite a few things he'd rather not discus in public just to keep the textures streaming properly. Everyone is swearing up and down that modding the graphics is near to impossible.

And, no offense, but if I have to choose between what you say about the memory requirements and what Carmack says its no contest. The same with the "page image settings" which others swear must be one of the things Carmack diddled with to keep the textures streaming fast on wimpy consoles.

 

[kylebisme]

There's no conflict between what Carmack has said and what I have, just a lack of compression on my part. Also, did you not even look at what Sebbbi said here? Note that he is the lead programer at Redlynx, one of the few other developers to make a game which uses virtual texturing.

 

[wuliheron]

There's no conflict between what Carmack has said and what I have, just a lack of compression on my part. Also, did you not even look at what Sebbbi said here? Note that he is the lead programer at Redlynx, one of the few other developers to make a game which uses virtual texturing.

What about it? I think he's right that streaming enough textures is obviously possible! I would add that I believe Carmack is right to take this approach of pushing more of the graphics pipeline all the way back to long term storage. So what? It still doesn't answer the question of whether your proposal is practical or not. The problem as I see it is one of raw bandwidth utilization where the individual numbers can be deceiving because you have to account for all the bottlenecks and the overall latency of the system under different circumstances.

I hear this a lot from people want to know what possible difference a few milliseconds response time can make in a monitor. In and of itself it can make no difference whatsoever to the human eye, but when added to all the other latencies in the system spanning all the way back to the hard drive it can become very noticeable quite often. For someone playing slow paced RPGs it might not be an issue, but hardcore id fans often prefer to use 120hz monitors and sometimes crank their games up to 180fps or more to avoid just such latency issues. Rage being a stripped down engine capable of 60fps on consoles means id has focused first on issues of speed and latency so they can at least determine first what are unavoidable latencies and what are non-issues before moving on to adding more complexity to the system.

 

[kylebisme]

What about it?

It provides a detailed explanation of increasing the texel density in Rage to fix the blurry textures up close wouldn't take more VRAM or faster more powerful system in any other regard. But sense that apparently flew over your head, I'll resort to quoting Sebbbi directly answering that question here:

It wouldn't require anything else than more physical storage space.

Got it?

It still doesn't answer the question of whether your proposal is practical or not.

Please quote whatever proposeal of mine you are eluding to here.

 

[wuliheron]

It provides a detailed explanation of increasing the texel density in Rage to fix the blurry textures up close wouldn't take more VRAM or faster more powerful system in any other regard. But sense that apparently flew over your head, I'll resort to quoting Sebbbi directly answering that question here:

Got it?

Please quote whatever proposeal of mine you are eluding to here.

Unless I'm mistaken we've been talking all along about your proposal to "fix the blurry textures up close". If you think its something else we've been talking about then please share.

Again, a webpage of posts by a few anonymous people cannot convince me these guys are right and Carmack is wrong when he says higher resolution textures require more vram. The new AMD hardware acceleration for the technology even includes the ability to use system ram as virtual memory if necessary to offload some the textures.

Got that?

Scaling textures according to your distance from things to provide an automatic LoD is what the id tech 6 is supposed to do and the id tech 5 can already use Nvidia cuda gpu transcoding, but doesn't provide the option you suggest. I seriously doubt Carmack was just being lazy or forgot and the obvious implication is it is simply not feasible or, if it is, it is only feasible on higher end rigs with among other things more vram.

 

[kylebisme]

Again, a webpage of posts by a few anonymous people....

Again, Sebbbi is the lead programer at Redlynx, as it says in his profile. There is nothing anonymous about him.

cannot convince me these guys are right and Carmack is wrong when he says higher resolution textures require more vram.

Carmack never said fixing the blurry textures up close would require more VRAM. You're obviously just misunderstanding what he said about more VRAM allowing for the 8k and 16k page image settings, which does improve the texture quality in the distance but does nothing to help the blurry textures up close.

I seriously doubt Carmack was just being lazy or forgot and the obvious implication is it is simply not feasible or, if it is, it is only feasible on higher end rigs with among other things more vram.

It's not feassible, but not because it requires more VRAM or a more powerful rig in any other regard, but rather only because, as Sebastian Aaltonen explained:

Going from 20 GB -> 80 GB (4x texture data on disc/HDD) isn't practical with the current discs and current internet download speeds.

 

[HeXen]

If it were feasible, it would have been done. /thread