Bethesda has a support thread with possible fixes for the poor visual quality experienced by PC gamers:
Below are solutions that may resolve issues you're experiencing with screen tearing, as well as blurry textures + texture popping. If you're experiencing these issues, we recommend you try these one at a time. If for any reason your performance suffers, revert back to the prior settings.
Issues w/ screen tearing
RAGE currently does not have a menu option to turn V-sync on or off.
If the graphics driver supports a so called "swap-tear" extension then RAGE will use it and RAGE will V-sync when running >= 60 FPS and RAGE will tear when < 60 FPS. Unfortunately at the release of RAGE, none of the graphics drivers have the "swap-tear" extension enabled.
The user can force V-sync on or off in the graphics vendor control panel. Right-click on the desktop to access the graphics vendor control panel.
If V-sync is forced on then RAGE will always V-sync.
If V-sync is forced off then RAGE will auto-detect that V-sync is not working and RAGE will instead synchronize to real-time and screen tearing may occur.
Alternatively you can force V-sync on by adding the following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:
+r_swapInterval 1
The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam and selecting "Properties". Then click on "Set Launch Options" in the dialog that pops up.
Blurry Textures and Texture Popping
The texture streaming is limited by the performance and number of cores of the main processor (CPU).
The higher the resolution at which the game renders and the higher the anti-aliasing setting, the more texture data is needed to texture the environment. If you do not have a high end CPU you may momentarily see blurrier textures and texture popping when the view changes quickly.
If you have a processor with few cores and you have a high end NVIDIA graphics card then you can try turning on the "GPU Transcode" menu option in the video settings menu in RAGE. By enabling this option a large percentage of the texture calculations are moved to the graphics processor (GPU). However, this option is not available on all graphics hardware and may not appear in the menu if your hardware does not support the necessary features.
On processors with few cores without the ability to turn on "GPU Transcode" you can significantly improve the texture streaming performance by adding the following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:
+vt_maxPPF 16
The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam and selecting "Properties". Then click on "Set Launch Options" in the dialog that pops up.
If you have very few cores like a dual core processor then you can set a lower value like:
+vt_maxPPF 8
If setting these values does not improve the texture streaming performance for you then consider lowering the anti-aliasing setting in the video settings menu in RAGE.
You may, for instance, observe slow texture streaming at high resolutions like 2500 x 1600 with anti-aliasing set to 16X. In some cases lowering the anti-aliasing to 8X fixes the problem but lower settings may further improve the texture streaming. Alternatively, or in addition, you can lower the resolution.
We hope these help. The teams at id and Bethesda continue to work solutions to help you guys. More to come!
On a high end graphics card you can also change the size of the texture cache in video memory. However, on video cards with 512 MB of memory you may see a significant drop in performance. The size of the texture cache can be changed by adding the following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:
+vt_pageImageSizeUnique 8192
+vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly 8192
+vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly2 8192
By adding these settings to the RAGE launch options more texture data will stay in video memory which may not only reduce blurry textures and texture popping but will also allow complex scenes to be rendered with more texture detail.
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