RAGE PC tweak guide

Below are some tweaks to help improve RAGE on PC, as its 'Auto Balancer' isn't particularly intelligent at determining which settings are best for your rig. Note many tweaks are personally tested and verified, and some come from publisher Bethesda or developer id themselves. All tweaks are for single player only.

Drivers
Be sure you have the R285 beta drivers from NVIDIA or the 11.10 Version 2 Preview driver from AMD.

Options
As of October 8, a patch has enabled a select few graphics options for RAGE, two of which are detailed below.

VSync

The 'Smart' option supports 'swap tearing', if supported by your GPU. The idea here is to maintain 60fps with no tearing, but for situations where you drop below, tearing will occur instead of the standard temporary drop to 30. If your GPU doesn't support it, it defaults to 'Off'.

Texture Cache
If you have enough VRAM, set this to large to improve textures and texture popping.

Command variables

Add these by right-clicking RAGE in Steam and selecting Properties > Launch Options.

+set com_skipIntroVideo 1
Skips the introductory videos.

+cvaradd g_fov XX
XX represents how much field of view you'd like to add on top of the default 80 (e.g. 10). On a high resolution monitor, you're likely to find it rather narrow, so experiment. On 1680x1050 resolution, 10 seemed about right, but you may prefer higher. May affect framerate.



+vt_maxPPF XX
A substitute for the "GPU Transcode" option, if it's not available in your video options menu. Both options compensate for a GPU bottlenecked by the CPU. Those with a dual core machine or similar should use a value of 8; for something a little better, try 16. Other valid inputs include 8, 32, 64, 128.

+vt_cudaBudget XX
Switch this to 16.6 or higher if you're happy with your framerate and want better image quality. It may negatively affect framerate.

Config file tweaks

Implement these by navigating to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base and creating a text file named rageconfig.cfg. Open it with Notepad and enter whatever lines you desire, then save and exit. Below are a variety of config commands, though I haven't tested them and can't verify what most of them do:

quote

com_AllowConsole 1
vt_qualityhdplossless 1
vt_qualityhdppower 0
vt_qualityhdpspecular 0
vt_qualityhdpnormal 0
vt_qualityhdpdiffuse 0
vt_qualitydctpower 100
vt_qualitydctspecular 100
vt_qualitydctnormal 100
vt_qualitydctchroma 100
vt_qualitydctluma 100
vt_usecudatranscode 2
vt_maxppf 2048
vt_minlod -1
vt_maxlockedpages 1024
vt_uncompressedvmtr 1
vt_uncompressedphysicalimages 1
vt_vmtrcompression none
image_lodbias -1
image_usecompression 0
image_screenshotquality 100

Sources (further information can be found here): NeoGAF, Steam forums, Bethesda forums, Geforce, Kotaku, Steam news.

Nicoteen No worries.

Dracos All is well except for that GPU which is way behind. Seriously -- upgrade it!