With the recent news of an upcoming RAGE surprise, a lot of PC gamers started wondering whether they’d be getting that rumored high resolution texture pack or not. Well, it appears that there wasn’t any such texture pack to begin with, as John Carmack has revealed that most of the source art isn’t at higher resolution, therefore there can’t be a high-resolution texture pack for it.
This is really weird. Way before RAGE saw the light of day, Carmack himself said that the uncompressed textures of the game were around 150GB or so and that the PC would be getting better textures after release. Fast forward a couple of months and what PC gamers got was worse a game that featured worse textures than those of Doom 3. Some of gamers thought that it was due to the compression techniques that were used. Others thought that iD Software lowered the textures’ resolution in order to fit them on current generation consoles. Fact is however that iD did not create any textures that were of higher resolution.
As Carmack tweeted:
“there won’t be a super quality texture pack. Most of the source art isn’t at higher resolution, and comp effects weren’t that bad.”
Back in October, Carmack said that their first test of a higher res page file didn’t help much to improve the game’s visuals. Back then, we said that iD Software would not be making any high-resolution Texture Pack anytime soon and it seems that we were right.
In February, iD Software released a patch that featured an adaptive sharpening filter. Although it was not as good as having higher resolution textures, this filter helped to improve the game’s textures by sharpening and adding a bit of noise to them. And unfortunately, this will be the only way to get – slightly – better visuals for RAGE PC. Unless of course some modders decide to create an unofficial Texture Pack for it.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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