VOGONS


First post, by Azarien

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I'm trying to run NFS Road Challenge (aka High Stakes) on Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Radeon HD7850.

I am unable to run the game on Windows XP at all - I'm getting the "Need For Speed files corrupted. Please reinstall" message.
The game does however run on Windows 10 (in Windows XP compatibility mode, to make things more puzzling).

Unfortunately, there is significant stuttering (about once a second) that I cannot get rid of. I tried low res (640x480), hi res (1600x1200), low details, high details, triple buffering on/off, forcing antialiasing on/off, anisotropic filtering - the problem persists whether I set everything to slowest settings and to fastest settings.
Running the game through affinity.exe to force it to single core does not seem to change anything.
Neither does using dgVoodoo 2 - again, in various resolutions and quality settings.

I am starting to thing this may be not an issue with graphics card at all, but rather the CPU being too fast - is this a known issue with NFS4?

Reply 2 of 6, by chinny22

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NFS4 was what actually got me back into retro computing!
Its actually due to WinXP more then hardware. I tried for a bit with various patches and failed so installed Win98 on a old P4 and called it a day.

Reply 3 of 6, by Flashback

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Hmm, version 4.50 runs fine for me in XP using D3D mode (with mercury patch to correct the saving issue).

I also get stuttering with nGlide though. Tried different voodoo2a.dll files, but that hasn't helped.

NFS3 stuttered too with nGlide, but disabling v-sync in nvidia control panel fixed it. Not the case with NFS4.

Reply 4 of 6, by Azarien

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Unfortunately I don't have a Win98 machine ready so XP and 10 are my only options right now.

I tried some more combinations. Stock Pack didn't really fix the problem, but it has a good version of 3DSetup that allows me to select Direct3D version:

- Software mode works better than D3D (not ideal) but looks ugly
- Glide mode (using nGlide) stutters even more than D3D
- D3D 9 stutters and does not play any videos
- D3D 8 stutters, does not play any videos and has broken fullscreen scaling (possibly related to known problem with Windows 10)
- D3D 7 stutters and is the best option I have
- D3D 6 crashes.

Given that I cannot get rid of the problem I decided to live with it, so I set the highest possible settings in the game and in the graphics driver (anti-aliasing 8x, anisotropy 16x) and I'm trying to pretend I cannot see any problem with FPS rate 😉

Reply 6 of 6, by Azarien

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Flashback wrote:

Someone on a YouTube video suggested using the ACT fix DisableBoostThread to fix lag and that solved the stuttering for me when using nGlide. 😀

Thanks. Here are my current settings, the best ones so far in terms of quality and smoothness (which still isn't perfect, but good enough)

d3da.dll used
DirectX 7 - Highpoly

in-game settings
resolution 1600x1200x32
everything set to high
triple buffer on

gfx driver profile for the game
force antialiasing 8xEQ supersampling
force anisotrophy 16x
framerate limit 60

compatibility settings in exe properties
none

compatibility settings in ACT
DisableBoostThread
EmulateGetDiskFreeSpace
SingleProcAffinity