id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 9:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
Creston wrote on Oct 7, 2011, 22:44:
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Edit : In fairness, after installing the latest AMD driver AND restoring the 8192 tweaks, it seems as if the texture flickering is finally gone. Hurrah.
Creston
Every time I dial in these forums I keep reading the same old crap about it being only a problem for AMD cards--good grief, and how many times does it have to be repeated? nVidia is the company--not AMD--who put out a faq for nVidia users to use the 8192 tweaks so that the damn game would run right on *nVidia* cards! Sheesh. The game might have run *marginally* better on nVidia cards without the 8192 tweaks--but nowhere near how it should have run. Just like the AMD cards. I read post after post on the Steam forums (where I actually first found out about the tweaks) written by nVidia users having horrendous texture pop-in problems and who were also unable to get the game to function in SLI. What's happened is that some nVidia fans have been spreading the word that it's "only ATi products having problems with RAGE" and ATi users, of course not having access to nVidia cards (and apparently unable to read other forums like I was able to do), have believed it! Hook, line, and sinker.
The truth is that the game in its released state sucked for both PC platforms. Also, the console version reviewed by Ars Technica was rife with its own texture pop-in problems to the degree that Ars gave the console version a great big FAIL--and promised to get to the PC version later. Graphical problems weren't the only thing Ars didn't like, of course, but the main point here is that they existed on the console versions, too!
The fact of the matter is that this is a crap game released by a crap company that is trading solely on past-accrued goodwill. The PC is what put Carmack on the map. Yeah, he's a damn sell out, but more than that--he's as friggin' lazy as they come these days--he could have substantially revised the PC version of this game to take advantage of the "ten-times more power" as Carmack puts it, but he's just not interested anymore in doing that level of work. A few years ago, Carmack worked his butt off doing it right for the PC. I guess the truth is that he's pushing up against his limits as a programmer these days. Who the hell is he kidding? Console technology is almost a decade old and the fact that he'd rather program for it than for the "10 times more powerful PC" speaks volumes.
I am so glad I did not buy this game. Maybe in a few years in the bargain bin for $5. Maybe. Or when it hits GoG...;)
It is well known that I cannot err--and so, if you should happen across an error in anything I have written you can be absolutely sure that *I* did not write it!...;)
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