Have you tried turning off hyperthreading in the bios ?
Save the following as RunMe.cmd and put it in the same folder as the game exe then double click on it to run the game

@start /affinity 1 nfs.exe

assuming nfs.exe is the correct name

Hi, thanks for the quick response 😀

Davros wrote on 2020-08-09, 01:59:

Have you tried turning off hyperthreading in the bios ?

No, but to be honest I'd rather not compromise the performance of my PC for the sake of one game (which isn't even that good to begin with...). Also changing the setting each time I play the game sounds like a bit of an overkill.

Davros wrote on 2020-08-09, 01:59:

Save the following as RunMe.cmd and put it in the same folder as the game exe then double click on it to run the game

@start /affinity 1 nfs.exe

assuming nfs.exe is the correct name

Unfortunately it didn't work. Neither does making the game use one core only in Task Manager. I also tried patching nfs.exe with imagecfg.

Could you try with a new game, sometimes the version miht be incomoatible, you may want to have a backup of the savegame first.

Tried it, the game still freezes 🙁

tgomola wrote on 2020-08-12, 09:02:

Tried it, the game still freezes 🙁

Check event viewer for the crash,.and what's the fault

I have figured it out.
The issue was indeed the number of cores. I used Special K tool to spoof the number of cores - now the game thinks there's only 2 and runs like a charm!

Case closed!

tgomola wrote on 2020-09-13, 22:56:

I have figured it out.
The issue was indeed the number of cores. I used Special K tool to spoof the number of cores - now the game thinks there's only 2 and runs like a charm!

Case closed!

i'm guessing you found a no-cd crack for this, the legitimate protected exe will abort on trying to start with specialk present. I see the latest versions patch around the crash issue, but generic patch can't work with the updated version.

indeed, the origin copy, and unofficial steam patch both fail to load in a networking function connected to punkbuster when more than 8 logical cores are present, this means even alderlake and 12+ core ryzen are affected without SMT enabled.