Need for Speed - Most Wanted : Performance Questions?

[SCHUMIinSA]

AMD Athlon64 3700+, 250GB HD, Asus A8NE-FM, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Radeon X850XT 256MB GDDR3 (PCI-e). This is the system I was running the game on.

Now when I have all the ingame settings maxed out , overbright, anti-aliasing to max the bar would go in other words everything at 1024x768 I get between 35 and 45 frames.

Then I descided to test my systems performance and set everything to max at 1280x1024 and I get 35 to 20 frames a second. The 20's however only occur when flying along the highway and there are those sunny>shady>sunny>shady sections.

Now which setting should I run the game at, be aware that I was happy with UG2 on 10-15 frames on an older computer so I am used to low frame rates?

I am also during this time running AVG, Antivir and Spybot Search and Destroy : TeaTimer in the background among other things. My standard Pagefile size is 520 MB. Would my performance at the greater resolution increase greatly if I turned all of those off?

Is there any other way that I could improve the game's performance at the higher resolution?

Also my fraps number turned red at one stage. What does that mean? Anybody know?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Sharkfood]

Decrease shadows/shadow detail.

NFS-MW (like some other "NVIDIA- The Way it's Meant to Be Played") still use crusty, old-tech stencil shadows which kill ATI's which are optimized for newer methods. It takes ATI cards roughly 3-4x the bandwidth to produce stencil shadows as it does NV cards, hence why TWIMTBP titles always favor stencil shadows.

Decreasing shadows/shadow detail a notch or two should have profound impact on framerate performance.

 

[SCHUMIinSA]

I guess I could try that although I don't realy wanna take anything away from this game's great graphics. Althogh a shade notch should not make a huge difference graphics wise. I guess the only way to to see is to try it out and see what I think?

How about some of my other questions?

For instanse which one would you go for the better performance of the lower resolution or the better image quality of the higher resolution?

I will also gladly accept any other suggestions anyone else may have.

 

[SCHUMIinSA]

I found a good solution. I set Visual Treatment to low and left everything else where it was. Now I get between 30-40 frames at max resolution which I am perfectly happy with. That strange yellowy tinge is also gone now, which makes everything look much more natural although overbright kinda looses in effect.

 

[fajoo24]

Also my fraps number turned red at one stage. What does that mean? Anybody know?

Hi, i just want to inform you as you said your fraps number turned red at one stage, this is because you may be accidently hit the video recording key for recording on screen video, when fraps starts recording the video the FPS turn red and when you hit the key again it comes back to normal color i.e yellow. However, beware that during video recording the FPS are reduced dramatically :hotouch: for example if you are getting 40 fps when playing normally then they may reduce to only 20-25 fps while recording video. You can also confirm this by checking the fraps directory where the videos recorded are saved usually.

Thanks

 

[SCHUMIinSA]

Thanks for letting me know. I will check up on that.

Yeah it was indeed correct I was accidentally recording. Thanks for the help.
I am relieved that, that red was not a sign of something bad happening.

 

[Cartz]

I'm not sure this is the case, but are AntiVir and AVG two seperate anti virus programs?

If they are, and they're not built to specifically run together, you should consider disabling one as it should drastically improve your framerates and overall system performace.

I have not used either, so I'm not sure if that advice is correct or not. They may work fine together.

 

[SCHUMIinSA]

They work fine together. I also had another one called Bitdefender which also ran together with these two, but that one basically caused the pc to hang if it found a virus so I got rid of it.
I have not encountered any conflicts and when turing Antivir off I received virtually no performance boost in the game, so I just keep it on.

Anyway this situation has pretty much been resolved with my setting Visual Treatment to low as I said earlier.