How To Unlock Rage's High Resolution Textures

Introduction

id Software's Rage launched to critical acclaim yesterday, though some PC gamers were perturbed by the lack of in-game configuration options. The reason for this is that the game dynamically adjusts detail levels at all times to try and maintain an optimum balance between performance and graphical fidelity. Throughout this piece you will find reference to higher resolution textures, which is what we believed the game to be loading when it was first written, but we have since discovered that id Tech 5 is far more complicated than that. However, such is the level of complexity that we believe 'texture resolution,' as used below, is relatable and easy to understand. We must make clear, however, that id Software has not in any way hobbled the PC version of the game, or held back high quality textures. Rather, the underlying technology requires refinement to make better use of the 12GB of high quality textures already available, as we conclude later.

In Search Of Higher Fidelity

At this year's E3 trade show id Software founder, and all round technical guru, John Carmack, told PC Gamer that the PC version of Rage is able to support higher resolution textures: "The consoles are limited because they don't have enough memory and on the PS3 you can't go larger than a 4096 squared texture. There's a lot of scenes that really need more than that on there, so a lot of scenes sort of hit an upper limit on the consoles, where on the PC where we can use an 8k by 8k texture for that we can bring in higher fidelity. So even if you're running the PC version at 720p resolution you'll get crisper graphics on there, and if you crank it all the way up to run at 1080p or higher then you can push twice, probably closer to three times the unique pixels the consoles can."

With that in mind, some gamers noted on forums that the visible textures on their high-end graphics cards were obviously not 8k, perhaps because of an Auto-Balancer error, and so people began experimenting with configuration files and console tweaks in the hope of forcing the textures to the level mentioned by Carmack.

Rageconfig.cfg

Not long later, ‘angular graphics' on the NeoGAF forum discovered that creating a .cfg configuration file in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base was the solution. Be aware, however, that you will almost certainly require a video card with 1.5GB of Video RAM to enable 8K textures, other graphical niceties and GPU Transcoding, though it may also work on systems with just 1GB of VRAM if said options are toned down. To discover how much VRAM your graphics card has open the NVIDIA Control Panel, click on ‘System Information' on the bottom left, and then scroll down the list to ‘Dedicated video memory.' The amount of VRAM is displayed in Megabytes, with 1.5GB being displayed as 1536MB.

Name the file rageconfig.cfg and add the following text using the Notepad application, located in All Programs > Accessories:

vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 8192
vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly 8192
vt_pageimagesizeunique 8192
vt_pageimagesizevmtr 8192
vt_restart
vt_maxaniso 4
image_anisotropy 4

If you have 3GB of Video RAM, you can modify the configuration file's first four lines to end with 16384, instead of 8192, which will enable Rage's 16K textures, though as we don't have a suitably-equipped GPU to hand we cannot offer any guarantees as to the game's stability or visual fidelity when using this modification. Update: We have now tested the 16384 configuration on a 3GB GeForce GTX 580 and can detect no improvements whatsoever. Based on our new understanding of id Tech 5 it may be possible to see benefits from 16384 at the very highest resolutions in the most demanding situations.

If you're unsure of how to set up the configuration file follow these steps:

1. Right click in the empty white space in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base (if you are using Windows XP or 2000 the path will be C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base)
2. Left click ‘New'
3. Left click ‘Text Document'

If the file that appears is named New Text Document.txt:

1. Enter rageconfig.cfg in the dialog box and click off to accept the change
2. Double click on rageconfig.cfg in the base folder
3. If you are prompted to pick an application to open the file with, tell Windows you will chose the application yourself, then select Notepad among the options and open the file
4. Paste in the configuration from above, hit Ctrl+S on your keyboard, and then close the file
5. Load Rage

If the file that appears is named New Text Document:

1. Click off to accept the naming
2. Double click on New Text Document to open it
3. Paste in the configuration from above
4. Click ‘File,' then ‘Save As'
5. In the ‘File Name' box type rageconfig.cfg and click ‘Save'
6. Close the file
7. Load Rage

The ‘8192' referenced on the first four lines relates to John Carmack's aforementioned 8k texture quote, forcing Rage to display 8k textures at all times, overwriting the Auto-Balancer. ‘angular graphics' also retrieved a slide from a tech presentation regarding id Software's id Tech 5 engine, which powers Rage. In the slide, id Software states that their engine can support 4x Anisotropic Filtering, so the config file also enables the quality-enhancing technique via the final two lines of text, in addition to the amount of Antialiasing specified in Rage's in-game Video Option menu.

For the complete article go to: http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

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