A quick fix for the awful screen tearing in Rage for the PC, which coupled with the streaming texture issues, are making many PC gamers very frustrated.

Update 10/08/2011: Steam just released a patch for Rage which allows Vsync to be turned on in the menu, along with a couple other fixes. Once updated, you should no longer need the tips detailed here. See the update notes for this Rage patch.

Fortunately, this fix is simple and straight forward. What is quite disturbing is how stuff like this gets through testing for a top shelf game such as this!

Screen Tearing Fix

This issue is simply a lack of vertical sync. I have never noticed vsync to be this bad, though.

Bethesda blames the issue on a “swap-tear” extension that apparently is not enabled for any video card at the time of release. Perhaps they were betting that this would be the case by the time the game came out. Looks like they gambled and lost!

There are 2 fix options, straight from the Sr. Community Manager at Bethesda:

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.

So your options are to use Nvidia Control Panel / Catalyst Control Center or set a launch option with Steam.

I simply switched my Nvidia Control Panel to Force On Vsync and this problem was immediately gone. If you haven’t done so already, you can get tips for solving the texture streaming issues that make images pop up when turning the camera quickly.