Is there a patch for the 2ghz+ low detail bug that works in Windows 98? I see patches that are for XP and newer but nothing for Windows 98. The best I found was this site: https://glizda.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/need- … -cpu-lod-patch/ that describes modifying hex values. I tried searching for the string that the author used:"75 08 8B 4D F8 89 4D FC 8B C1 8D 04 80 8B E5 5D C3", but I could not find this string in my exe. I also tried the 3.5 exe which didn't have those values either.

edit: Actually, looking at some screenshots it seems like the game doesn't have very detailed textures to begin with so I'm not sure what settings are being affected.

Its mostly the headlights, the speedo is way more blurried and other small parts on the car like the radiator gates.

The 3.5 enhanced patch works fine for me on 98se. And the textures are normal again.

bloodem wrote on 2021-04-05, 05:18:

In my experience, the fastest video card that still works with NFS 5 Porsche in Win98 is the Radeon X800XT/X850XT You don't need […]
Show full quote

rfratelli wrote on 2021-04-05, 03:57:

Yes I've tried some older drivers (from Phil computer labs website). No luck. I wasn't using the patch in first place I just tried the patch when It did not worked out of the box.
Must be some kind of VGA compatibility issue because I remember running it under win98 back then, I just don't recall on which hardware.

Anyway, such a great game!

In my experience, the fastest video card that still works with NFS 5 Porsche in Win98 is the Radeon X800XT/X850XT
You don't need this video card, though, unless you want to play at very high resolutions with AA & AF. Also, it should be noted that the NFS5 frametimes are all over the place even with the fastest hardware possible (game engine limitation).
Here's some graphs that I made a few months ago (tested on a Pentium Dual Core E5800 @ 3.8 GHz). You can decide which video card is best for you, depending on the resolution you want to play at.

NFS5.exe crashes after Intro, unnecessarily which patch I chose.

NFS5_PU_PATCH_1.06 by Verok didn't work, NFS5EssentialsV2.zip neither.
Tested on Thinkpad W500 with Intel GMA and FireGL (XP SP3 zone94)

FireGL cards are worst than Quadro for gaming. Try disabling that card or uninstall the drivers. GMA should work OK-ish.

When running games on Windows 98 and VIA 693A or MVP3 chipset make sure you tweak it using wpcredit to increase memory performance. VIA chipset's poor memory performance can significantly affect the frame rate. Ideally use Intel 440BX or VIA 694.

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed unfortunately isn't compatible with Yamaha SM718 ISA sound card and sound effects play too fast. Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 has the same problem. An ISA sound card is not the best idea for Windows games.

I prefer to play NFS 2000 with AA\AF 8x anti-aliasing and low resolution (720x576), so I had to pay special attention to the graphics card. I originally chose a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra for my retro build, combined with the ForceWare 56.56 driver (For Win9x) and it was pretty good. Not too old and not too new driver for this game (And others). Later I upgraded to GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with the same driver version and it was even slightly better (But not for DOS, in which UniRefresh stopped working, which worked fine with the previous video card). Later there was information about fixing a bug with later versions of drivers for this game (ForceWare 60+ for Win9x) and there was nothing to hold back in choosing a video card. One thing can be noted that for the purposes of smoothing, top models are better suited.

(once DirectX is upgraded, you can't just downgrade).

DirectX Eradicator to help you.

I suspect the game demands a lot of CPU power,

No, the performance hasn't really changed much, either from going from the P4 to the x6800 or from the x6800 to the i7 4790k. Mostly depends on the video card and driver.

is there a fps counter for this game?

Fraps will do.

Tried to revert to dx7.0a, old Nvidia drivers (4.14.10.8185) but nothing seems to work.
Any suggestions?

The ForceWare 77.72 for Win9x driver is the latest relatively hassle-free for this game, using an alternative DX7 handler (dx7z.dll), of course, since the original "dx7z.dll" requires ForceWare 56.64 (for Win9x) or lower at most. Obviously "old Nvidia drivers (4.14.10.8185)" is the problem in your particular case. Also, as an option, you can try playing with Glide or OpenGL emulators.

Porsche unleashed. It will start without any issues, then at the menus it will freeze. The music keeps playing, but the mouse pointer will not move and no keyboard combination (Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt+F4, etc.

This is a well known issue and only affects Windows 9x\Me. To solve it, immediately after launch, minimize the game and lower the priority using any third-party task manager, such as Process Explorer for example or similar, or immediately start the game using a batch file (BAT), which will specify a program that automatically lowers the priority for process "PORSCHe.ICD". For example, I am using the product "PV.EXE" for the specified purpose. This is how it looks like in the batch file:

start /MIN "E:\GAMES\NFS5\Porsche.exe" /MIN
timeout /t 5 || ping -n 6 2130706433
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi Porsche.exe
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD
E:\GAMES\NFS5\pv.exe -pi PORSCHe.ICD

It is written several times to ensure that the priority is guaranteed to change (Quite often PORSCHe.ICD does not start immediately, but the program should have time to work out correctly). Or, as already mentioned above, the profile for this game in RivaTuner makes it look like the same thing in principle (Did not check).

------------------------

As for the issue of reduced graphics quality on >2000Mhz processors, I'm not completely sure as I'm playing the original release version 3.0 installed from CD without any patches, but the first time after launch I had to go into the graphics settings menu and enable everything to the maximum. This needed to be done once.

Further, as far as I remember, I played with various third-party patches designed to improve graphics, but they either did not give a significant effect or lowered the FPS too much, so in the end the completely original version was returned and successfully completed without any significant problems or crashes .

Now I still play this game occasionally, from time to time, using a bunch of:
Windows 98 FE + DirectX 7.0 + 4790k + GeForce GTX 7800 PCI-e + ForceWare 77.72 (D3D + fixed dx7z.dll), AA&AF 16x

Remarkably, regarding the previous configuration, based on:
x6800 + GeForce FX 5950 Ultra + ForceWare 56.56 (D3D + original dx7z.dll), AA&AF 8x

The FPS didn't get any better!

Yesterday I tested NFS:2000 with the OpenGL version of the driver. On the plus side, this version works with ForceWare drivers > 77.72 up to and including 82.69. Also, with this version, the FPS performance is slightly better. Smoke, as expected, dark gray. But in the garage and in the whole menu, as if it were a 16-bit image, which is a minus, it immediately catches your eye.

In summary, I came to the conclusion that for ForceWare 56.64 drivers (inclusive and below), it makes sense to use the original dx7z.dll, and for drivers from 60.86 to 77.72, both the corrected dx7z.dll and OpenGL versions of the driver will do. But for versions 8X.XX and higher, the OpenGL option seems to be the best solution available. The only thing is, I haven't considered the Glide wrapper options yet. You should try them too.

What variants of Glide wrappers are compatible with this game under Win9x?
(It is advisable to list all in order to determine the best one).

In my opinion if you want to use win98 and play games on it, it is better to stay on single core CPUs everything else is giving you headache. I tried alot of hardware, but the best results where on p3. Its fast enough to play games up to year 2001 but also compatible with older games. I tried it in a p3 800 with a GF2 TI and wirh a Resolution of 1024 and full details i get average fps between 40 and 50

NFS Porsche is one of the first games I run on pretty much every machine I come across. To get both EAX sound and have enough grunt to push high res / high AA with very high detail car models, I like it best on my WinXP machine with Verok's patch. Both cards I have installed in that machine (a Radeon 7970 and a GTX 780) run it very well.

Having said that, I also enjoy running it on my main desktop (I7 4790K / Radeon 5700 XT) and laptop (Ryzen 5600H / Radeon RX 5500M) under Linux / Wine with Verok's patch using the OpenGL 3 renderer. Extremely smooth performance, but the sound is not as good as on my WinXP box.

As for Glide wrappers, I have tried installing dgVoodoo2 into the game's Wine prefix on Linux in conjunction with DXVK and that worked fine. But the OpenGL renderer seems better in my testing.

WRT running the game on original Win98 era hardware, I used to run it on quite a few different cards. There was a TNT2, a Geforce 256, a S3 Savage4, 12 Mb Voodoo2 SLI. The Geforce 256 did the best job, and I don't remember noticing anything that would make the Glide renderer preferable (vs 32 bit colour DX7 rendering).

I remember the headlights in night races looked bad in Glide, so DX7 was definitely the way to go for Porsche, even on a voodoo3