The NVIDIA GPU based video cards came out of testing as very clear winners in this game. Performance was exceptional, and they support the texture transcoding on the GPU feature by way of NVIDIA's CUDA technology. All three NVIDIA video cards were capable of playing RAGE at 2560x1600 with 8X AA, 16X AF, Large Texture Cache, and GPU Transcode enabled. The GTX 580, GTX 570, and GTX 560 Ti all put in very close performances due to the 60FPS performance cap in RAGE.

The AMD video cards we used in this evaluation performed well. The HD 6970 was playable at 2560x1600 with 8X AA and 16X AF, same as the NVIDIA video cards. Performance was lower than the much less expensive GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but it was playable. The Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6870 were playable in RAGE at 2560x1600 and 4X AA.

Overall, the experiences provided by the AMD Radeon HD 6970, HD 6950, and HD 6870 were comparable to those provided by the NVIDIA video cards. The GeForce card had an edge thanks to CUDA-based GPU texture transcoding, but it wasn't that big of a deal. After a few minutes in any given environment, the texture pop-in issue fades to being a minor annoyance with the AMD video cards installed.

The blurry textures on many (if not most) surfaces, however, can't be helped by GPU transcoding, or anisotropic texture filtering, or even selecting Large for the Texture Cache option. The PC version of Rage shipped with the same texture assets as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, in spite of the fact that texture memory is not limited as much with modern video cards as it is on gaming consoles. The only way that particular issue can be fixed is through a (presumably very large) high-resolution texture pack.