yo_john117 said: ethomaz said: A meh game runing meh... the problem is the hardware? So the others developers are magical . It's not a meh game and it is most certainly not running "meh" either. If they would have made the game 30 FPS instead of 60 it would have easily had Uncharted 3 like visual both close up and far away (right now it already has almost perfect graphics when you don't look at stuff to closely)

Did you like Rage??? For me it is a meh game .

Did you read my first post in this thread? The Rage PS3 complaints and the question causing that tweet from John only concern the texture streaming on the PS3 version. Nobody is complaining about anything else.

How would developing on the PS3 as the lead platform have improved the texture streaming? Whether you start first or last, the blu-ray speed, buffered IO reads, less RAM and split resource caching don't change. Do you know why developers recommend starting with the PS3? Well if you kept up with the history of Rage, you will see they started out early with the PS3 in the mind... they created their whole code-base to be job-based (a much better fit on the PS3 architecture)... specifically so the engine would work best on the PS3. So the other platforms are already running on a job-based system designed for the PS3. Plus as I said already the Cell is being used when ever available for grunt work on the texture transcoding.

I wish I could get it across to everyone that everything possible was done on the PS3 to make it performant. Honestly if not for the slower PS3 harddisk reads and blu-ray the game would be identical on the X360 and PS3.

I mean... really the game looks great. Compare the horror of Bayonetta to this. It's 99% the same, except the highest level textures load in slower than the X360 version when fully installed. The article in the OP is just a scrape together piece of sensationalist trash. From Carmack himself on his twitter:

So the PS3 version is right in the middle according to him. And from videos I've seen his summary is correct:

PS3 partial install (only option Sony allowed) > 360 uninstalled. If that isn't a clue that the difference is purely IO based, then I don't know what else to say. Blu-ray streaming will never be faster than X360 hard disk streaming... never.

ethomaz said: yo_john117 said: ethomaz said: A meh game runing meh... the problem is the hardware? So the others developers are magical . It's not a meh game and it is most certainly not running "meh" either. If they would have made the game 30 FPS instead of 60 it would have easily had Uncharted 3 like visual both close up and far away (right now it already has almost perfect graphics when you don't look at stuff to closely) Did you like Rage??? For me it is a meh game .

It's not as good as it could have been but it's a very solid fun game. One of the better FPS games I've played.

yo_john117 said: ethomaz said: yo_john117 said: ethomaz said: A meh game runing meh... the problem is the hardware? So the others developers are magical . It's not a meh game and it is most certainly not running "meh" either. If they would have made the game 30 FPS instead of 60 it would have easily had Uncharted 3 like visual both close up and far away (right now it already has almost perfect graphics when you don't look at stuff to closely) Did you like Rage??? For me it is a meh game . It's not as good as it could have been but it's a very solid fun game. One of the better FPS games I've played.

Good to read some guys here liked it... for me it just a 6/10 game.

Edit - FPS I liked this gen: BioShock, Killzone 2, Halo 3 and CoD .

Except megatexturing is what enables them to achieve 60fps gameplay. Instead of eating up GPU cycles on generating LOD shadow maps infinitely into the distance (like most games), they can store all that info in the textures and render them as-is. In order to store all the lighting information to achieve this, all the texture info HAS to be unique. It's not just an anti-repetition solution you know.

This kind of implementation will be adopted by other developers going forward in one way or another, because it's a solution to big graphics problem. It also enables artists to work more freely. Fast IO in next-gen consoles will make it a must.

All this "fiasco" makes me remember when they developed Doom3 and, instead of calculating the lightning shader in real time, they developed texture lookups. In the nVidia FX cards it helped a lot, due to their poor shading capabilities, but in the top cards of the 9 series of ATI it made the game slower. A graphics enthusiast (Humus, nowadays the main developer of the engine used in the avalanche studios games -> Just Cause 2) discovered this, and developed a substitution shader that improved the performance in almost a 40%.

When you develop a game for more than one architecture, sometimes you have to adapt to the shortcomings of one of them, but you can't always develop close to the metal. Some PS3 fans think they deserve that the developers spend much more time in their version than in others. That was reasonable in the last generation, with one console capturing almost the 75% of the market, but it's unreasonable in a market almost evenly fragmented.

This post and Zarx understand well what is going on.

Great post.

Technically Rage is the most impressive game on consoles.

I agree, you have to adapt the software to the hardware. And RAGE renders a highly detailed open world at 60 FPS, so I think they've done a very nice job of adapting. Certainly nothing else on consoles can quite compare to what id has achieved here. The PS3 version falls short only because there isn't quite enough RAM, and reading from the blu-ray/harddrive in the PS3 isn't quite fast enough. 

On a game that has been five years in the making, I think id made the right decision in building a system that is usable across all three HD platforms. What you're saying is that id should have spent possibly a lot more time and money making a slightly better version for the PS3, which would be pretty silly. Hence why Carmack replied as he did.

And I'm aware that tiled textures don't mean you have to use duplicate textures. Mega textures do however make a no-duplicate-textures policy technologically feasable in an open world game on consoles. Compare and contrast to what GT5 does, with a 40 minute install (an atrocity in user experience imo) and fairly long loading times before each race (not permitted in an open world game), and I think it's fair to say that RAGE uses a sensible, if not 100% optimal, solution.

I wouldn't say the most impressive technically speaking game on consoles but it is up there and it is doing things that no other engine is doing. It's a game of trade offs, for going 60fps and uniquely texturing the entire game world they had to sacrifice texture resolution, dynamic lighting etc. They also had to limit the number of enemies on screen and it can't hold 720p resolution or 60fps all the time and it suffers from some screen tearing and a lot of pop in on all platforms exept a very high end Nvidia powered PC with the game installed on an SSD with a custom tweaked ini file.

Many of it's problems tho are bassed on the 6 year dev cycle, decisions that made sense 6 years ago don't necessarily make sense today. Doom 4 will be where the engine really shines as that game will not be as limited by old tech and art decesions so will be more open to recent developments in rendering especially with the RAGE team now transfering over to work full time on Doom 4, also running at 30fps on consoles will mean higher quality assets and more effects like anti-aliasing etc are possible even with the aparent doubling in the number of enemies that can be on screen at once which gives me the feeling it will be a return to the run and gun balls to the wall action of DOOM I&II with epic fights in rooms full of dozens of enemies.

Which will mean that the PC version running at 60fps is going to be truly a sight to behold lol.

To be fair, it goes both ways. But I think we should give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Carmack.