id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 8:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," 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."
Ray Marden wrote on Oct 8, 2011, 22:15:Huh, what are you talking about? People were complaining about v-Sync not being enabled when the game was first released, which required people to force it on through drivers. This patch exposes the v-Sync option, allowing you to enable it to prevent tearing - the side effect of this is a drop to 30hz when the system isn't able to provide 60hz. That's because tearing is caused by refreshing the frame during the display cycle refresh, meaning that for 1 of those 60hz you get maybe 1/3 of one frame and 2/3 of another.
So...patch notes that contain a blatant lie?
A game that mandates a 60hz refersh rate - tearing, texture resolution, graphical quality be damned?
And, if you don't give it 60hz, the game is going to limit PC gamers to 30hz?
The game defaulted to v-sync off, which meant that there could be occasional tearing when the game dropped below 60fps.
This patch allows those that WANTED v-sync to be able to enable it, as well as a new Smart option that will provide the best of both worlds. id Software has introduced the best possible implementation of v-sync.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
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