Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

[Shawn Zipay]

For those who already own the game, this comes as no surprise, however it should be known that RAGE will feature extremely limited control over the visuals for all PC gamers. Tim Willits, lead designer of RAGE sat down with idgames.de to answer a few questions, including the reason for the lack of manual visual control.

I took the opportunity and looked at the options menu. There were no graphic options beside resolution, brightness, anti-aliasing and GPU transcoding. Is this a limitation of the test version?

This is a feature of the id Tech 5. The Engine automatically adjusts to your hardware to ensure the best performance and graphics the hardware can provide.
For example: You have a video card with 512MB VRAM, 4GB of normal RAM and a decent processor. Now the id Tech 5 adjusts the quality of the Level of Detail to the available resources. If you have twice the RAM the engine scales dynamically up to it, improves the textures and objects in the far look sharper and more detailed. At the same time the engines tries to keep running at 60 FPS even though this is not also possible – dependent on the situation.

How do you feel about this lack of control over your game? There's no word yet on if these settings will be editable in some .ini file but as for in-game options, you won't have a choice.

[Thortok2000]

Keeping in mind I'm probably never going to play RAGE anyway, it's the idea that other games might do this too that I'm replying to. And my reply is... Why? Was coding an options panel too hard? I like to turn up my graphics to maximum and play a very pretty slideshow sometimes. If all the graphics are at maximum, the FPS tells me when it's time to upgrade. I often play games at 30 FPS just fine, there's no need for it to reduce visual quality just to get me to 60 FPS. That said, if I can get visual quality AND 60 FPS at the same time, awesome, and I often do anyway. I just want an option to override the game's settings and put it on 'max.' I'm all about the eye candy. Unless FPS gets below 20 then it shouldn't touch my settings. And if it lowers them it should turn them back up again if the FPS improves. So perhaps it should offer you a setting of what kind of FPS you want it to try to aim for instead.

[Stryker]

No point in lowering a PC standards to try and equal them out to consoles. I don't think a game has ever accurately adjusted my hardware to settings. I have a 550ti and Oblivion sets it to low, despite my i7, and 8 GB ram. It's an idea that sounds good on paper, but PC gamers are a-lot brighter than your average console user I think we can adjust the settings ourselves, like we have for....decades.

[DrunkenPirate]

Re: Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

Just another weak excuse from just another company too lazy to give a shit about PC gamers.
Developed for the console and ported over, simple as.

[5t3v0]

Re: Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

From what I have gathered on PC gamer ID no longer know what they are talking about anymore.

[Eagle101]

i agree with all of the above comments. i try not to hate too much on consoles considering i share a 50/50 ownership of a ps3 and 360 with my brother, which also i haven't toughed in a year btw. But it is ridiculous to see companies do this, i would say my retaliation would be piracy but i wont, it just ticks me off that's all. i wish we could go back to the way things were since HL1, CS, BF42. But in my high hopes BF3 will change that and bring true PC gaming back to me.

[dieandrot]

big deal, i'm sure there's gonna be some config file or fix for this within a day or two... people really hate being told what to put their settings at.

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

They apparently did this with the console versions as well, as I found out after this story went up.

On the PS3 the game will drop to a lower resolution to maintain 60fps. On the Xbox 360 it'll lower detail and texture resolution to maintain 60fps. So this isn't just something against PC gamers, it's the game as a whole.

[cikame]

I'm sorry pc devs but sometimes i don't like your post processing, i always use anisotrophy x2, anti aliasing x2 or off, mostly out of habit since i have a pc that can handle mostly anything. We learned the technologies behind 3D graphics through tinkering and being asked to make choices in these options menus. How about this, with your super advanced new engine, leave the options there and ADD an auto mode... don't force it to be the default.

[papasmurf128]

As someone who never has the high enough graphical settings for games nowadays, it's nice to be able to auto adjust the settings so I'm not always goin to the options and trying to tweak the settings. Now I don't know if it adjusts them on the fly or just in the settings menu. So I praise these decisions by the company.

[5t3v0]

Re: Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

As someone who never has the high enough graphical settings for games nowadays, it's nice to be able to auto adjust the settings so I'm not always goin to the options and trying to tweak the settings. Now I don't know if it adjusts them on the fly or just in the settings menu. So I praise these decisions by the company.

Actually, I think the problem lies with the game not letting you tweak it at all, so if you want just a bit more Frames per second, or are running just under the recommended Frames, you have to go a whole step lower. And from what I have seen from gameplay footage on the PC version, there is only "Low", "Medium", "High".

Also, plenty of games have an automatic Graphic detection, but it allows subtle tweaks. RAGE I think doesn't even let you do that.

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: Very Limited Graphical Options in RAGE, Game Auto-Adjusts Settings For You

There are ways of tweaking the game, but it requires you creating your own cfg file. Someone crafted a great config file that has about 35 lines of custom configuration settings that works great with a GTX560Ti, which is what I have. There are other config files out there for slower cards and others for better cards as well.

So once I added that, set a command line option to stop the opening videos from playing, forced vsync and triple buffering through the nvidia control panel, AND manually created a cache folder in my appdata folder (something that the game points to bud did NOT automatically create), the game runs and looks amazing.

The engine itself is great, and I'm sure once id Software starts to fix/tweak things on their end it'll be one of the best engines out there, but for now you have to rely on user fixes. I can run with fantastic visuals at 1920x1080, 2xAA, and a near constant 60fps after all this.

You can see some screens here: http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...postcount=6049

And here: http://steamcommunity.com/id/zips/sc...ilter=app_9200 (The one shot taken on the 5th was before most, if not all of the above mentioned tweaks.)