Our RAGE review will be coming on Monday, due to the fact that my computer’s PSU blew up and took my motherboard with it.
Now, ironically, I haven’t had any issues that other PC gamers seem to be having, especially ATI owners, with their video card drivers not getting along with the game, causing all sorts of texture issues, frame rate drops, and pop-ins.
Now, the pop-ins themselves seem to be an unfortunate part of the game; I have them at a very minimal level. But the frame rate issues plagued me early on, due in part to the fact that I wasn’t able to set triple buffering and vertical sync in-game; I had to do it through my nVIDIA control panel. That, however, is changing.
In addition to making some tweaks to the id Tech 5 engine, the following features will be added to be customized in-game:
– Texture Cache [ Small | Large ]
– Texture Anisotropy [ Low | High ]
– VSYNC [ Off | On | Smart ]
Now then, you might be wondering why the PC version of the game, a game developed by id Software of all developers, was having so many issues. Here’s what John Carmack had to say:
We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.
You read that right. John Carmack himself doesn’t see the PC as a leading game platform. To be honest, he’s right; when I think of PC gamers, I think of MMORPGers and casual players, not FPS enthusiasts, as much as it pains me to say, despite reports that PC gaming plans to overtake console gaming by 2014.
But here’s the thing: RAGE’s audience is more likely to own an Xbox 360 or PS3 over a computer that can run RAGE just as effectively. I, however, can run a computer that runs RAGE very effectively, and I absolutely love it. Was it worth all the trouble of rebuilding my computer, updating drivers, and refreshing forums at 4 in the morning on launch day? Hell yes. I’m happily playing RAGE on my rebuilt system and enjoying every second of it. This is the love/hate relationship that comes with PC gaming. The multiplayer in Crysis 2 didn’t work at first, RAGE has had drivers issues, WoW doesn’t always like new technology. But at the end of the day, I’ll always play a game on the PC over consoles.
Well, not every game; just my shooters.
Information from Kotaku was used in this article.
