Prior to developing the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, Rockstar Games, and primarily its Rockstar North studio, mostly used Criterion Games' RenderWare engine to develop games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, such as the early 3D installments in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. In 2004, Criterion Games was acquired by Electronic Arts, which led Rockstar Games to switch from RenderWare, and open RAGE Technology Group as a division of Rockstar San Diego. RAGE Technology Group started developing what would later become RAGE, based on Rockstar San Diego's previous Angel Game Engine. The first game to use the engine was Rockstar San Diego's Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis, released for Xbox 360 on May 23, 2006 and ported to the Wii more than a year later. Since then, RAGE integrates the third-party middleware components Euphoria and Bullet, as character animation engine and physics engine, respectively. On seventh generation consoles, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, RAGE often saw a disparity in the optimization on the hardware: major titles on PlayStation 3 usually had lower resolution and minor graphic effects, as in Grand Theft Auto IV, in and in Red Dead Redemption. Despite its problems in optimization equality, in July 2009, Chris Stead of IGN voted RAGE as one of the "10 Best Game Engines of Generation", saying: "RAGE's strengths are many. Its ability to handle large streaming worlds, complex A.I. arrangements, weather effects, fast network code and a multitude of gameplay styles will be obvious to anyone who has played GTA IV." Since the release of Max Payne 3, the engine supports DirectX 11 and stereoscopic3D rendering for personal computers. Max Payne 3 also marked the first time in which RAGE was capable of rendering the same 720p resolution on a game, both on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This benefit has been achieved also in Grand Theft Auto V, which renders at a 720p resolution on both consoles. For the remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto V, RAGE was reworked for the eighth generation of video game consoles, with 1080p resolution support for both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PC version of the game, released in 2015, showed RAGE supporting 4K resolution and frame rates at 60 frames per second, as well as more powerful draw distances, texture filtering, and improved shadow mapping and tessellation quality. RAGE would later be further refined with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, supporting physically based rendering, volumetric clouds and fog values, pre-calculated global illumination as well as a Vulkan renderer in the Windows version.
