Rage Linux Port Is Not Likely Until 2012

[sirdilznik]

LMAO at people expecting a good story out of this game. This is id we're talking about, they're not exactly known for deep and engaging storytelling. Also putting any stock in user reviews on metacritic is rather misguided in my opinion. Metacritic user reviews are notoriously flooded with "OMG THIS IS THE WORST GAME EVAR.! I WANT MY MONEY BACK. DON"T EVAR BUY THIS CRAP 0/10" reviews most of which are probably made by people who never even played the game but are just there to shit on something for the hell of it and to post in ALL CAPS. Now it's true that the game suffers from serious texture pop in when played as stock. I found those issues can be fixed with some tweaking by creating a config file and messing with some values. This is what I used: http://www.dsogaming.com/editorial/r...ical-settings/ With some twiddling and lowering my Anti-Aliasing setting to 4X (honestly while I'm sure that technically there is some difference going from 4X to 8X or 16X anti-aliasing, my eyes can't tell the difference during gameplay) I got it to where the texture pop in occurs fairly rarely and it pops in so quickly (milliseconds) that it's not distracting. Obviously your mileage will vary depending on your hardware and drivers (Phenom II 965BE, GTX460 1GB, 285.05.09 drivers here) and if you have an AMD/ATI card, as with any game running through wine, good luck with that. Not saying it won't work but let's face it the Catalyst driver is notoriously more problematic with programs running through wine than nvidia's blob. I will say this, while I have no problem creating a config file and messing with it or entering console commands, id really should have included some of these adjustments in the in-game options for the many people that aren't comfortable with anything beyond point and clicking. The options they did include are bare-bones to say the least and not nearly adequate.

Anyway, from what I've played of the game here's my quick impressions: It's a visually stunning game with silky smooth animations. The draw distance and level of detail is ridiculous, I've only seen one game even come close, The Witcher 2 (I can play TW2 maxed out except ubersampling). The shooter mechanics are top notch, as you'd expect from id, and the driving is surprisingly competent. The game is a lot more open than any previous id game, though it's not exactly Morrowind or Oblivion either. Still it's open enough that you can go dicking around the wastelands in a buggy blowing shit up and catching sick air. It's not on the level of GTA as far as having fun dicking around and doing crazy stunts, but it's nonetheless pretty fun tooling around in the buggy. If you're looking for a great story, look elsewhere, it's just an excuse to send you places to kill things.

So to summarize: Great looking game with tight shooter mechanics, surprisingly fun driving, and a throw away story.

[RealNC]

What? Witcher2 is butter smooth on my GTX460. All maxed out (without ubersampling, of course) running at 1920x1200. Finished it twice in less than a month after it was out. Now I'd like to play the 2.0 patch, but I have no time

Core 2 Duo 3.3GHz, Radeon HD4870, 6GB RAM: When all settings are maxed out, I get exactly 3FPS. Yes, a slideshow. The engine of that game is a joke. With minimum settings, I get about 25-30 FPS, which is still a joke.

[bug77]

That's strange, the 4870 should be about 80% as fast as my GTX460. Unless you have the 512MB version, which may not have enough memory to handle the largest textures. Also, ubersampling is a no-go for pretty much anyone. The game also seems to be CPU dependent so your missing two cores may also have an impact.
Oh, and what resolution do you use?

[sirdilznik]

Core 2 Duo 3.3GHz, Radeon HD4870, 6GB RAM: When all settings are maxed out, I get exactly 3FPS. Yes, a slideshow. The engine of that game is a joke. With minimum settings, I get about 25-30 FPS, which is still a joke.

Part of that may be due to you running an AMD card. Don't get me wrong, I'm no AMD basher, I like the company and would consider running their video cards (I feel a bit weird running an AMD CPU with a nVidia GPU) were their drivers better. While AMD sometimes puts out better GPU hardware (especially lately), their drivers are notoriously flaky, even on Windows, and the problem is magnified on Linux. Running Catalyst drivers on Linux and trying to run games through wine brings with is a whole other set of problems on top of the problems inherent to getting a game to work through wine. You can look at just about any entry in the wine AppDB or browse through the bug tracker and see a whole slew of issues AMD/ATI card users face while nVidia users far more often than not have smooth sailing, comparatively speaking. It's possible to get games to run well through wine with AMD/ATI cards in many cases, but it often involves extra hoops to jump through.

Another thing to consider is, did you update the game? I remember I had wildly inconsistent framerates with my GTX460 1GB with the initial release of the game. In some parts it would be slightly choppy even on low settings while in other parts the game ran buttery smooth even on very high settings. With each subsequent patch the game received, starting with 1.1 which was released a mere week after launch, the issue got better for me to the point that by the time I patched up to 1.3, and subsequently now with the 2.0 release, the game runs silky smooth all the time at 1920x1200 with "Ultra" settings, minus of course Ubersampling, but you need a supercomputer to run the game with Ubersampling.

[RealNC]

I already finished the game in minimum settings. It was still very fun, but the graphics sucked hard. I pay more attention to gameplay and story in RPGs (hell, I even still play text adventures on a regular basis), so it was still an extremely good game for me; didn't feel like GOG ripped me off or something. But man, those were really some shit-ugly graphics playing at minimum :P No matter how I think about it, a C2D running at 3.3GHz with a 512MB 4870 and 6 gigs of RAM should deliver *awesome* graphics (you should see how Mass Effect 1&2 looks here, simply amazing.) If not, then there's really no excuse for the 3D engine. Simply poor implementation.

My 4870 btw has 512MB RAM and I played at 1920x1080.

[V!NCENT]

Rage is looking awesome... I mean er-... was, when John Carmack decided to make the GPU transcoding CUDA only, which is kinda wierd, if there is OpenCL as well... So it suffer horribly from not-fast-enough loading textures.

But from a gameplay side of things it is awesome. I just wished that AMD cards side of things were not being half-assed...

So where are the settings to turn things down a little? Oh in the RageConfig.cfg. Oh look, we got all kinds of settings there that totally crash the fscking game!

After getting realy frustrated with it, because I had to see the intro movie about 9 times before I could get to a save point, it was working.

Working you say? Well sort-of, but the texture filtering went missing. Lulwhat? But OK it works... nice.

But then you might want to pause the game for a second, right? "Big Mistake!(TM)", said Jack Slater. It turned out that pausing and unpausing the game results in... well let's call them tiles instead of pixels.

What da fscking fsck?! FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-...

Now at least if they were so kind to simply say "You just gonna have to buy the latest pc with an nVidia card", but for crying out loud: NO!

There better be some multiple patches for this shit, one being from id to fix the freaking feature-check (I couldn't care less for settings if they would just work) and stability. And AMD should just create some very low-level interface for direct GPU memory acces or otherwise all upcomming console games will not get ported to the PC.

Seriously... my graphics card is like xBox360-GPU^(9.9*10^9999999999), yet the graphics power makes everyone cry. I won't spare nVidia on this, either. When John Carmack favors Intel graphics, and they happen to run very nicely on Intel graphics, one realy has got to worry about WTF is going wrong here

[smitty3268]

Rage is looking awesome... I mean er-... was, when John Carmack decided to make the GPU transcoding CUDA only, which is kinda wierd, if there is OpenCL as well... So it suffer horribly from not-fast-enough loading textures.

But from a gameplay side of things it is awesome. I just wished that AMD cards side of things were not being half-assed...

So where are the settings to turn things down a little? Oh in the RageConfig.cfg. Oh look, we got all kinds of settings there that totally crash the fscking game!

After getting realy frustrated with it, because I had to see the intro movie about 9 times before I could get to a save point, it was working.

Working you say? Well sort-of, but the texture filtering went missing. Lulwhat? But OK it works... nice.

But then you might want to pause the game for a second, right? "Big Mistake!(TM)", said Jack Slater. It turned out that pausing and unpausing the game results in... well let's call them tiles instead of pixels.

What da fscking fsck?! FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-...

Now at least if they were so kind to simply say "You just gonna have to buy the latest pc with an nVidia card", but for crying out loud: NO!

There better be some multiple patches for this shit, one being from id to fix the freaking feature-check (I couldn't care less for settings if they would just work) and stability. And AMD should just create some very low-level interface for direct GPU memory acces or otherwise all upcomming console games will not get ported to the PC.

Seriously... my graphics card is like xBox360-GPU^(9.9*10^9999999999), yet the graphics power makes everyone cry. I won't spare nVidia on this, either. When John Carmack favors Intel graphics, and they happen to run very nicely on Intel graphics, one realy has got to worry about WTF is going wrong here

Rage is a console game first and foremost that has been ported to the PC. Which is why you see all the performance problems with discrete graphics cards.

[V!NCENT]

Rage is a console game first and foremost that has been ported to the PC. Which is why you see all the performance problems with discrete graphics cards.

Are HDRadeon 5470 mobility and a dedicated HDRadeon 5770 discrete graphics?

I don't know, but there has even been a report about a Macbook Air, having an Intel onboard 3000 GPU runnign Rage at 40fps without popping.

Currently, no matter what the drivers (even Rage fix and Battlefield 3 11.10) are causing heavy glitches on both of my HD5xxx GPU's.

The mobility one is a lot less horrible than the desktop 5770. The popping is killing. The desktop keeps crashing and I currently have to play it on my laptop.

[V!NCENT]

It appears that AMD released the wrong drivers and that work is underway, where AMD is working with id, to get this mess sorted out.

I guess I'll have to wait... >.<

[RealNC]

I have a question for you all. If Rage is a console game, then how come the PS3 and XBOX versions have the exact same texture pop-in issues? Explain that please :-)