Rage - Configuration Examples?

[AEon]

Still have not downloaded Rage on Steam, waiting for a quicker internet connect that should be there in a few days, hopefully.

I have been reading up on configuring Rage, apparently some things have been patched out again, in the latest version... if that is the case... WTF?... there seem to be some configuring you can do to tweak graphics, though. I would be very interested if you folks could post your settings, adding some comments on what they do.

Thanks.

I have an i7 920 2.66GHz, with ATi HD 5850, 6GB under Windows 7 Pro (64bit)... even though my machine is now 30 months old, most games like Crysis 2 have been running pretty well on "max" settings. So I am hoping this will also be possible for Rage. Especially reducing any texture popping would be a priority. Hopefully, this late in the game, the really ugly issues of the PC version have been ironed out.

[Despair]

You shouldn't have any issues running Rage. I have almost the exact same PC as you and it ran flawlessly at 1080 for me, though it did take a bit of tweaking. There was only the one patch a couple weeks after release, so nothing has really changed. Just so happens I still have my RageConfig.cfg file and steam launch options, though i can't say i remember what they all do. You should easily be able to google the commands to see what they're for though ofc. pm_nobob is the only one that i know doesn't work (was locked in the patch). I also remember needing to create some path for a cache file which helped a fair bit, so you may want to google that as well. hope that helps
RageConfig.cfg:

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seta vt_maxAniso "4"
seta image_anisotropy "4"
seta image_usecompression "0"
seta g_showplayershadow "1"
seta ik_enablesmoothing	"0"
seta vt_lodBias "-2"
seta image_lodBias "-1"
seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizeunique "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizevmtr "8192"
seta vt_maxPPF "32"
seta vt_filter "1"
seta vt_qualityhdplossless "1"
seta vt_qualityhdppower "0" //0-255 lower is better
seta vt_qualityhdpspecular "0" //0-255 lower is better
seta vt_qualityhdpnormal "0" //0-255 lower is better
seta vt_qualityhdpdiffuse "0" //0-255 lower is better
seta vt_qualitydctpower "100" //0-100 higher is better
seta vt_qualitydctspecular "100" //0-100 higher is better
seta vt_qualitydctnormal "100" //0-100 higher is better
seta vt_qualitydctchroma "100" //0-100 higher is better
seta vt_qualitydctluma "100" //0-100 higher is better
seta vt_maxlockedpages "2048"
seta fc_maxcachememoryMB "1024"
seta pm_nobob "1"
seta com_videoRam "1024"

Steam Launch Options:

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+set com_allowconsole 1 +set com_skipIntroVideo 1 +cvaradd pm_nobob 1 +seta mem_phymemblocksizem 3072 +fc_maxcachememoryMB 1024

[AEon]

Thanks... that really helps... I will start to go through the infos I found so far and correlate those against your settings.

The large physmem block is something I have not yet seen also the cache one... those should really help.

I am a bit apprehensive about achievements, since Steam does like to bitch about them, i.e. you config something and then the achievements no longer trigger.

What I really miss, and those seem to either never have worked or simply do not exist, are how to turn off the HUD, and the weapon model and noclip (apparently the latter was patched out). I like to explore and take clean screenshots... and id engines used to be the only ones (other than Valve's engines) that let you do that...

FOV Tip (found on net):

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Additionally, if you want to change the FOV you’ll have to
add the
	"+cvaradd g_fov 20"
command to the game’s launch options. By doing this, you are telling the game to run at its
default FOV that is increased by 20 degrees. RAGE’s default FOV is 80 so if you add 20, you’ll
get a FOV of 100. Feel free to lower that number to find your sweet spot.

I will probably play with FOV 90, like in Q3A.

[Eraser]

This guy got some clean Rage screenshots:
http://enwandrews.tumblr.com/archive

[lvlshot]http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6236/6405 ... ed75_o.png[/lvlshot]

[lvlshot]http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6231/6383 ... 184c_o.png[/lvlshot]

Maybe he cropped the HUD out though.

[fKd]

never though id say this, but god i wish the game had extra sp dlc... i wanna go back there again

[AEon]

Turning off HUD might be this (Steam forum):

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hands_show 0 // will disable HUD (no impact on achievements)

and

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g_showhud 0 // turn off HUD (no impact on achievements)

Former would be the weapon model AFAICT the latter the actual HUD... hopefully one can bind those to keys.

Will see how that works... I have turned off the weapon model in Q3A for ages now, and was really surprised to see them again in Quake Live... was disorientating to have something block part of the view.

Anyone else have settings/configs? Would be neat to collect all the pertinent info in this one thread.

Update: As was mentioned one should probably create a cache folder:

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users/yourname/AppData/Local/id Software/Rage

... interestingly those cache files will then be on my SSD... so this should be really quick.

Update 2: Apparently... "It's come to my attention that enabling console disables Steam achievements (if you care about them). Just a heads up!"... woopdidoo...

[kaustic]

I failed to see why alot of people didnt like Rage. I thought it was a fun game. The FOV command line is nice to know.
I'm running a i7 3930K Sandybride-E ,32 Gig PC2400(quad channel set), 2 EVGA Geforce GFX 670 FTW w/2Gb ddr5 in sLi.
Only problems I had running anything so far was Quake Live. I had to disable sLi for it to render correctly. I have some
older game that wont work even in compatability mode(win7 pro) But thats another topic.

[Eraser]

I actually liked Rage

[AEon]

I still have not played it... but from what I read the problem were the initially distributed drivers that came with the game, making Rage excessively unstable. Plus even on highest settings it looked like crap... required massive amounts of tweaking from the "community" to look decent. The patch seems to have fixed most of those issues. So the problems were not really the game, but technical issues, that can really piss off folks.

Though if I read that correctly, only ONE patch seems a bit on the reduced side. How would one patch fix so many issues? Even Q3A had 5-6 of them IIRC.

I'll find out soon

[ailmanki]

I guess people did not know if the low res textures are a bug or intended. After installing 20+GB most people expect high detail everywhere. But most things are blurred on close up. Can't wait for next game with this engine though, looks highly realistic if your not getting to near.
There is s setting to display the stuff going on behind the scene..
http://renderingpipeline.com/2012/03/me ... s-in-rage/
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articl ... le-tweaks/

[kaustic]

I'm going to give those settings from the article http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articl ... le-tweaks/ a try
and see what happens.

vt_useCudaTranscode 2
vt_cudaBudget 14
vt_maxPPF 128
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4

[AEon]

From reading up on the mater of configuring Rage, alas things are less trivial than one would want them to be. Many config examples and tutorials are from a time pre-Patch. Now with the Patch on Steam, most of the tweaks have become redundant or worse counter productive. I.e. the patch already sets the proper variables when set from the in-game menus. Some older settings positively can mess up the game badly.

From what I read, Despair's settings (second post in this thread) seem to be "good" additions to what patched Rage will recommend. I'll do some testing myself, i.e. see what patch Rage recommends, and correlate those to the recommendations above.

kaustic, your results would be of interest.

Note, again as I understood it, those "geforce" articles mostly were written pre-Patch... so take them with a grain of salt. And there seems to have been the ugly issue of geforce vs. ATi drivers... with ATi folks having more problems. I belong to the latter crowd, hope Rage looks "good" enough and works.

[kaustic]

The cfg doesnt seem to make any difference. I took 3 shots(had to put Rage in a window and do print screen and copy to Paint)
Once you open the link click on the pic and it will go to full screen.Once the pic is at full screen there is a menu item above the pic
that says Newer > Older just click to cycle the pics(after the 3rd are old pics of maps I'm still messing with).I should mention
that I play Rage without any issues at all.It runs just fine for me. I also put a screenshot of the Nvidia Control Panel showing
my system info in regaurds to my Vid cards(click on newer for that ss).

Rage Without cfg - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaustic/81 ... hotostream

There is a video option in game to enable Cuda Transcoding.I cannot enable it,it tells me I dont have enough memory
or hardware support. Its my guess its the hardware support because according to the artical I have enough memory
on my video cards.I left it in the cfg for the test to see if it would do anything during that portion.It had no effect.

I also have the directions for enabling PCIe 3.0 on the motherboard if anyone hasnt tried it yet.My CPU doesnt officially
support it according to intel. I actually get better results in 3DMark using PCIe 2.0 .

I set +set com_skipIntroVideo 1 +cvaradd g_fov 20 and I like very much .

[AEon]

Hmmm... this is the worst performing game I have played since I got my i7 920 Quadcore 2.6 GHz. I had thought that since it is supposed to run at 60 FPS on those crummy consoles, a 6 GB system, Win7Pro (64 bit), ATi HD 5850 (Catalyst - 12-6_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc) should easily run the game. I even have a SSD as main drive where the cache files are saved.

I set the in-game gfx to 1680x1050 (native resolution), 4x AA and High AF, and that worked more or less, though after leaving the arc, the FPS drops to 14-22, then if I stand still I get 60 FPS at times, tons of popping textures. So I thought well, AA is just too high, dropped it to 0, also AF to low... no difference, FPS will still drop to 14 FPS.

Then used Despair's config (see 2nd post in this thread) and the game visuals actually seem to have become slightly worse (after restarting the game), and still the FPS will not go up.

This basically means that combat is impossible, since the lag-outs are so bad. Don't get me wrong, I used to play many games with less than 24 FPS under XP, but Rage is really bad. You actually try to avoid looking around to not run into the "lag wall".

GFX per se look OK, if you ignore the popping-in of textures.

Hopefully someone can give me some tips how to improve things. I thought id had sorted things out after over a year. Sigh

P.S. After dying on the first mission, and after using the the defibrillator, the FPS suddenly was 60 FPS and fluid...

[Despair]

Well ,the entire rage team was moved onto doom 4 once rage shipped, so aside from that one minor patch, it has not been touched since. Pretty sure they've decided to just not repeat the mistakes they made with rage on their next title instead of wasting resources trying to fix them.

Only thing i could suggest to get it working is just keep trying things one thing at a time. Both times i played it i had to do some hunting/fiddling with commands to get it running well, but once i got it going it ran basically perfectly. I don't update video drivers unless i'm having an issue, so I should be on the same ones i was when i last played rage (catalyst 12.3). You could give those a try.

Gotta keep in mind though, even though the game is more than a year old now, idtech5 is still a beast of an engine and it rapes hardware. I know several people that simply cannot run Rage at all, despite having a PC that is more than powerful enough. It just won't work for them no matter what they do. You might be among the unlucky ones unfortunately. :\

[AEon]

I continued to play the game some more. The problem seems to be the Wasteland, as soon as that gets into the picture (literally) I have those ugly FPS lag-outs. My guess would be lack of memory (RAM or possibly VRAM though I have 1GB of that in theory).

I might have to resort to rebooting to then directly run the game, just to ensure I am running as little other stuff as possible. Catalyst 12.3... will give that a try, though I seem to remember 12.6 was the first version that fixed serious issues with Rage, thus why I installed that. Hmmm...

All this is all the more annoying because the rocky landscape *really* looks awesome. Never seen such great unique textures.

[AEon]

Temp invert the pitch/yaw when driving a vehicle

For those still annoyed and looking for a partial solution try this:

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bind "t" "m_pitch -0.022;m_yaw -0.022"	// Inverts view for vehicles
bind "y" "m_pitch 0.022;m_yaw 0.022"	// Return to default FPS view mode

Enter above in Rage's in-game console. Then when you enter a vehicle, press the t-key, it inverts the default pitch and yaw. When you exit into normal FPS mode, press the y-key.

Yes, this is ugly, and annoying because the game saves the cfg *every time* you press those keys. But at least you can properly look around while riding a vehicle.

You can easily choose your own preferred keys, and play around with the pitch.

[AEon]

Despair,
turned on the console, to test a few things and found out that adding a ";" in a "//" comment in a .cfg file actually breaks it. Your config I was using (due to my added comments) was actually not properly loading, i.e. about 50% was skipped. Now that it works my FPS drops are no longer as bad and the game stopped lagging out so badly. The manual, "vt_restart" may also have helped.

Using:

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bind "MOUSE5" "toggle g_showhud;toggle hands_show"

I can even toggle the HUD and weapon for clean screenshots... hopefully, since I turned off the console again, the achievements are still tracked. (Update: Indeed they are, so I can play the game and take clean screenshots, whee... a bit).

[AEon]

A small tip to improve IO-speeds for Rage using an SSD drive:

If you happen to have a SSD drive, and Steam is *not* installed on that drive (in my case I have Steam on a 500 GB SATA drive on D:\), you could try to copy (well move actually) the entire Rage folder to the SSD drive, e.g. from

• D:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\RAGE

to

• C:\temp\RAGE

then softlink the latter RAGE folder back to the Steam folder. That way Steam will think the game is installed in the Steam sub-folders, whereas in fact Rage is now installed on another very fast drive. (I have to do it this way because my SSD is only 75 GB, and Rage alone takes up 21.2 GB)

I just tested this, the overall loading times of textures have dropped and the FPS-related lagouts have been further reduced. Making the game run much smoother. Even though I have read that Rage is much more CPU intense, I actually think that the game is IO (i.e. HDD speed) limited.

[ailmanki]

There is some info about the 2 patches:
http://rage.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_1_PC
http://rage.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2_PC
http://rage.wikia.com/wiki/Tweaks
edit: for example you could add the game cache file folder as a softlink to your ssd (if that isn't already on the ssd).

Hopefully Mod tools come soon out, JC seems to be working on these though

large.jpeg

[AEon]

Yeah, the cache files are on C:\ i.e. on the SSD already. Alas the lag it catastrophic when you enter the Mutant Bash TV arenas... 11-15 FPS... a real annoyance... like playing in thick syrup, performing a slowmotion "dance". Why the heck would the indoor areas have such crappy FPS in the first place. Sigh.

Update: Thanks for the links. Had been thinking about looking into the rage wikia page, but had forgotten. The details about the patches are interesting and the console commands as well.

[obsidian]

Odd. I haven't had any issues at all with regards to FPS. I am running on an nVidia GPU though.

[AEon]

May be my high texture settings, that are lagging out my system, i.e. IO streaming is simply too slow on my system for some reason.

Obsidian,
does your GPU have more than 1 GB of VRAM? And how much RAM do you have? I suspect my 1 GB VRAM and 6 GB RAM is simply not enough... the game needs to swap too many textures.

All this reminds me of the bad old days where id's games would run better in OpenGL using one specific GPU brand (was it nvidia?)... I really seems that id simply never tested the game on ATi cards, and does not really care about those either. I still do not understand what "weird" drivers id must have had to test Rage to then be surprised on the game's release that the game would not run. Hmmm...

[obsidian]

1GB VRAM, 12GB RAM (though I don't think the amount of system memory has anything to do with it).

Have you tried using just the stock .cfg and see if it runs okay? Maybe all your tweaking caused something to not work as intended.

Have you tried updating your video drivers. I know AMD had some issues with their earlier drivers that are supposed to be fixed in recent versions.

[AEon]

The stock configs I used at the very beginning. Exiting the arc I immediately lagged out in the Wasteland. The tweaks all "slightly" helped.

Video drivers 12.6 are supposed to be the first "good" ones for Rage. Though they recently released newer ones. Might indeed give those a try.