Rage Technical Analysis

Rage Technical Analysis

Read our Rage PC review
Read Rage's system requirements

Rage, the latest game from id Software and publisher Bethesda Softworks, has been in development since at least 2007, but it seems that all the years of effort since then still haven't been enough to ensure a smooth PC launch for the game. In fact, id Software's post-apocalyptic shooter has drawn serious flak for the technical problems that have plagued the title - including a lack of performance customisation options and texture problems on a huge number of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.

Not only that, but id Software founder and technical figurehead John Carmack even went as far as admitting that the launch of Rage on PC was a 'a real clusterf**k', pointing to driver issues and problems with Rage's graphics auto-balancer.

'We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems,' Carmack told Kotaku. 'When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work.'


The auto-balancer was also behind the lack of graphical options, with id Software admitting that Rage defaulted to lower settings than the engine may strictly have been capable of in order to ensure reasonable performance - even on high-power systems.

'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,' read an official statement.

A new patch has since been issued to correct many of these issues, however. The patched version of Rage still only has limited tweaking options, but something is better than nothing and, combined with Rageconfig.cfg tweaking guides from Nvidia and new performance drivers from AMD, there's now enough reason to take a closer look at the debut of id Tech 5.

Over the next few pages we analyse just how much PC gamers can currently tweak Rage's graphics using a combination of in-game menu options and Rageconfig.cfg tweaks. All tests were performed on a Windows 7 64-bit test system using 6GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 6900. The version of Rage we tested uses the 8 October patch and was run through Steam.