Steam News has details on a new patch for RAGE that's now automatically available to update id Software's first -person shooter. The lengthy patch notes go into extreme detail on what the patch does, as it offers access to many graphics settings not present in the release version of the game. Here's the into which explains this:

RAGE defaults to lower video settings to allow the game to work on a wide variety of hardware and software configurations. Unfortunately, it is not possible to anticipate all possible graphics driver issues in combination with unique end user hardware and software configurations. For this reason RAGE does not automatically increase video/graphics settings as this could result in negative side effects on specific hardware and software configurations. 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. Due to popular demand for more video and graphics options, this patch updates the video settings menu and exposes several quality and performance settings. However, not everyone may be able to increase the settings due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs.

The Bethesda Blog summarizes the patch notes:

• Implemented workaround for AMD driver crash right after intro cinematic on Win 7 32-bit systems.
• Disabled UBOs because they are causing animation issues with AMD drivers. Don’t allow swap-tear to be enabled on AMD while the extension is not exposed because it may crash.
• Support for new video settings: “texture cache”, “vsync”, and ”anisotropic filter”
• Automatically adjust vt_maxPPF based on the number of available cores.
• Improved performance for SLI cards when GPU transcode is enabled.
• Fix for GPU Transcoding option being disabled after exiting gameplay.
• Added safe mode to restore video settings to default values.
• Allow g_fov to be changed from the RAGE launch options in Steam.
• Server now forwards text chat from clients to all other clients while in-game.