A major PC patch hit RAGE this past Saturday addressing the graphical hitches that plagued its launch, as id Software's John Carmack labeled it as "a real cluster !@#$." Problems arose from the release of incorrect video card drivers that was partially solved last week.
"The original release of RAGE does not expose many video/graphics options for people to tweak because some of these settings, although desirable from a quality perspective, simply will not work on specific configurations either due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs," the patch notes state. "Due to popular demand for more video and graphics options, this patch updates the video settings menu and exposes several quality and performance settings. However, not everyone may be able to increase the settings due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs."
New video settings include VSync option to address screen tearing, texture cache and anisotropic filter to improve texture loading. A patch summary is listed below:
- Implemented workaround for AMD driver crash right after intro cinematic on Win 7 32-bit systems.
- Disabled UBOs because they are causing animation issues with AMD drivers.
- Don't allow swap-tear to be enabled on AMD while extension is not exposed because it may crash.
- Support for new video settings: "texture cache", "vsync" and "anisotropic filter"
- Automatically adjust vt_maxPPF based on the number of available cores.
- Improved performance for SLI cards when GPU transcode is enabled.
- Fix for GPU Transcoding option being disabled after exiting gameplay.
- Added safe mode to restore video settings to default values.
- Allow g_fov to be changed from the RAGE launch options in Steam.
- Server now forwards text chat from clients to all other clients while in-game.
