Is there a way to reduce texture popping in Rage?

Question

Rage is a good looking game, and it sure runs so smoothly on my desktop, which is far from top of the line. While that is technically impressive, it seems there are no free meals, as I am plagued by some very annoying texture popping.

While I understand that loading textures only when you need them can be very efficient, the game doesn't seem to predict the required textures well enough. When looking around frantically (not uncommon in an FPS) I often find myself seeing something like the following:

Which soon enough turns into:

I recall coming across an article that discussed possible tweaks for the game, which stated this had something to do with a small number of CPU cores (I have four, personally, and I don't really consider it a small number...). The article also said this area will be improved in a future patch, but that meanwhile there are a few launch-parameters that can help alleviate the issue.

Has anyone had any success at resolving the texture popping issue, or at least making it less common? If so, I would like to know how and if there are any trade-offs.

Answer

First of all check that you have installed the last drivers from your video card vendor. If you have an ATI, like me, these are the recommended preview drivers that improve performances for RAGE and Battlefield 3: AMD Catalyst™ 11.10 Version 2 Preview Driver

In addition I applied the Mid-End config suggest in this Steam's thread (all credits to FusedCore). There are other three config, choose one based on your system configuration, look at the comments and try to customize it a bit.

I have an ATI Radeon 6850 with 1GB and 3 core CPU, and now the popping issues are less evident. There is still some occasional 1/2s freezes or some stuttering but it helped me a lot.

Finally today (09 October 2011), it has been released the first support patch.

The new "Texture Cache" option in the video settings menu allows you to increase the texture cache size to keep more texture data in video memory.

If the Texture Cache is set to LARGE then RAGE will keep more texture data in video memory. This may not only significantly reduce blurry textures and texture popping, it will also allow complex scenes to be rendered with more texture detail.

I haven't tested it yet, but you can try set Texture Cache to LARGE and cross your fingers.

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