Those of you who play vidya games primarily on consoles may have insulated yourself from an increasingly common scourge facing your PC gaming brethren: problematic PC ports. While we're sorry to say that Rage is suffering from some launch-day issues, the PC gaming godfathers at id Software aren't abandoning the platform. So put down those pitchforks. And torches.
The above video is a good example of the issue: textures pop-in every time the camera moves. It would appear the high-res MegaTextures that id's John Carmack has been talking about for years are being dropped from memory immediately and not streaming in quickly enough. The Xbox 360 release, underpowered relative to the gaming PC in this video, exhibits very little if any texture pop-in which sort of puts the blame purely on your friend and ours: graphics card drivers!
Bethesda Blog says that, in addition to the texture issues, there are also screen tearing problems but insists that both problems "can be attributed to driver issues" which id Software is "currently working with Nvidia and AMD to resolve [...] as quickly as possible."
For AMD graphics card users, "you should not use" the beta driver that Bethesda shared yesterday. The Battlefield 3 beta drivers will crash to desktop "100% with those drivers," and Beth Blog recommends updating "to the most recent driver when AMD updates, which we're told will be in a few hours." Nvidia users "should try updating Rage to the current beta driver" and Beth Blog will let everyone know when that's available. Be patient, PC gamer. It's been seven years since the last internally developed id Software game; another day or so isn't going to kill you.
