Posted by Chris Scott Barr on Oct 9, 2011

As promised, id and Bethesda have released their first patch for RAGE, which promises to fix the graphics issues that have plagued users since launch. If you’ve spent your weekend being frustrated and vowing not to play the game again, you might want to consider firing it up one more time.

The patch does a few things to help alleviate (and hopefully fix) the numerous graphics issues that users have been encountering en mass. First, you’ll notice that the default settings are much lower. Next, VSync can be turned on, which should completely fix the screen tearing issue. However, a side-effect is that if your frame rate drops below 60, it will briefly drop all the way to 30. That’s just how VSync works. There is also the option to set Vsync to “SMART”, if your graphics driver supports it. “If your graphics driver supports this extension and you set VSync to SMART then RAGE will synchronize to the vertical retrace of your monitor when your computer is able to maintain 60 frames per second and the screen may tear if your frame rate drops below 60 frames per second.”

The next feature to be added is the ability to set your Texture Cache. Basically this allows you to store a greater amount of texture data in your video card. The more memory you dedicate to this, the faster textures will load, plain and simple. Just be careful that you don’t dedicate too much memory to this, as it can result in a crash, if you run out of VRAM.

Lastly, you are able to adjust the Anisotropic Filter. This one is pretty basic. The higher the setting, the better your textures are going to be. Just be warned that if your system has it defaulted to “off”, it may not be able to handle Anisotropic Filtering at all. Turning it on can cause additional issues, if you do.

There were a few more tweaks to the game that should help it run more smoothly. These include automatically adjusting adjust vt_maxPPF based on the number of cores present, and increased SLI performance. You can find the complete patch notes here.

The big question on everyone’s mind is why these settings weren’t available from the start. It’s not as if id is unfamiliar with the PC gaming crowd. In fact, that market has been their bread and butter from the start. If anything, this fiasco should send a message to every other developer out there. That message says that we PC gamers don’t just want the ability to tweak every possible graphic setting, in some cases we may actually need it. If there is a single setting that stands between a smooth game and one that crashes or is visually appalling, then we should have the right to change it.

Don’t dumb down our interfaces because you think your software is better at determining what our systems can handle. Some of us will push our rigs to the very edge, just to see what happens. Others will select slightly lower settings, to ensure that their framerate never dips below 60. In short, we are all different people with different machines, and we want to tweak our games to accommodate.

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