id Software"s first game in seven years -- Rage -- was released to the public on Tuesday. However, many gamers who bought the PC version of the post-apocalyptic first person shooter, either in retail stores or via download, have been reporting issues with the game"s graphics since its launch. The official Rage message boards is just one place where gamers have been reporting a number of problems with the game"s textures as well as screen tearing.
The official Bethesda Softworks blog has posted that both it and id Software are aware of the PC graphics issues, stating, "These problems can be attributed to driver issues, and we’re currently working with NVIDIA and AMD to resolve them as quickly as possible." AMD did release a graphics driver fix for its Radeon-based PC cards earlier today but that may have actually made things worse. A Twitter message from AMD"s Catalyst driver rep states that the driver, " ... includes very old OGL files, that"s why you"re seeing corruption etc." Later today AMD did release the correct Rage driver version for Windows 7 owners.
As far as PC gamers that have NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards inside their rigs, they are advised to download the current beta version of the GeForce drivers (285.38) that were released about a week ago. These are the same beta drivers that were made to improve performance for NVIDIA-based graphics cards while playing the current Battlefield 3 multiplayer open beta. There"s no word on when NVIDIA will release a version that will also improve performance in Rage.