Another Patch for RAGE on PC Coming Soon

id Software will soon release a new patch for the PC version that will help sharpen some of the game's textures.

Friday id Software's John Carmack said that a patch is on the way to help alleviate the blurry textures in the PC version of RAGE. The patch will reportedly add a bicubic-upsample+detail texture option that should "de-blur" some of the game's textures.

A "detail texture" is essentially a small texture with some generic detail that's "tiled" across the base texture of an object. Epic Games offers a few screenshots showing the difference, with detail-texturing in the Unreal Engine Development Kit turned off here, and turned on here. This method makes the overall object textures look sharp and detailed even though the base texture is dull and blurry.

"Bicubic-upsample is just a form of interpolation, it isn't going to make it hardly any better," points out one Bethesda forum member. "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."

Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if Carmack & Co. will release a higher-resolution textures pack anytime soon. "Our first test of a higher res page file didn't help much, because most source textures didn't actually have any more detail," Carmack said via Twitter.

So far the team hasn't indicated when the new patch will be released, so stay tuned.