It’s getting pretty bad out there when the company once renowned for revolutionizing the graphics side of PC gaming has to release a patch after the fact to “de-blur” the game’s textures. Not that Rage looks crummy, but you know, consoles—what can you do?
Last Friday, id’s code-guru John Carmack tweeted “We have a bicubic-upsample+detail texture option for the next PC patch that will help alleviate the blurry textures in Rage.”
A “detail texture” is basically a higher-quality texture swathe that’s applied (or “tiled”) across an object. If you want to see what this looks like in a different game, Epic Games has detail texturing example shots here (off) and here (on).
Reactions on the game’s official message boards have been mostly positive, though at least one dissenter claims “Bicubic-upsample is just a form of interpolation, it isn’t going to make it hardly any better. To make it actually better, we need higher res texture packs, and I hope we don’t have to wait a whole year for that.”
But if you’re holding out for id to bless Rage with higher-resolution textures, it sounds like the returns in testing were diminishing:
“[Our] first test of a higher res page file didn’t help much, because most source textures didn’t actually have any more detail,” wrote Carmack.
So while that’s not a flat no, it’s an implied “probably not.”
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