Need for Speed: Rivals

If people stopped giving EA money for this crap, they might stop making crappy console ports.
 
At the stock 30fps everything runs great for me, settings maxed, might try to add 2xMSAA from drivers and see if it's still steady. I guess that performance level makes sense; as I'm running a 7850, which I've heard is the closest equivalent to the PS4 GPU.

Tried bumping to 60 on high settings, could only muster 40-50, then I knocked everything back to ultra and was getting 36, so I set my maxfps for 36. Gameplay was really funky with an odd number like that so I had to go back to default. I wonder if the game only runs correctly in multiples of 30...

The visuals are nice, but not mind blowing like I expected. I played a little bit of Blur a few weeks back, and this doesn't seem to look that much better. I guess Blur already had pretty sweet car models and effects. Rivals' environments are definitely a step up, though.

Only played a couple online races after getting the visuals locked down, seems like the game could be fun if enough people are in your game, otherwise it might get old... we'll see.

MavericK96 said:
If people stopped giving EA money for this crap, they might stop making crappy console ports.
Click to expand...

My bad...

In my defense, before BF4, the last game from EA I played was Mirror's Edge, and that was a pretty awesome port.
 
EnhancedInterrogator said:
At the stock 30fps everything runs great for me, settings maxed, might try to add 2xMSAA from drivers and see if it's still steady. I guess that performance level makes sense; as I'm running a 7850, which I've heard is the closest equivalent to the PS4 GPU.

Tried bumping to 60 on high settings, could only muster 40-50, then I knocked everything back to ultra and was getting 36, so I set my maxfps for 36. Gameplay was really funky with an odd number like that so I had to go back to default. I wonder if the game only runs correctly in multiples of 30...

The visuals are nice, but not mind blowing like I expected. I played a little bit of Blur a few weeks back, and this doesn't seem to look that much better. I guess Blur already had pretty sweet car models and effects. Rivals' environments are definitely a step up, though.

Only played a couple online races after getting the visuals locked down, seems like the game could be fun if enough people are in your game, otherwise it might get old... we'll see.



My bad...

In my defense, before BF4, the last game from EA I played was Mirror's Edge, and that was a pretty awesome port.
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Wait till you hit the rain or snow sections of the game and at night. Visuals can be really flashy during that time and racing can be a PITA and exhilerating :D.
 
At 45 fps physics and animations seem to be fine. I find this to be a good balance of fps and eye candy for my 6950. I have lighting at high, reflections and effects at low with SSAO. During the daytime I have performance to spare, but GPU utilization starts peaking out during intense nightime runs from cops.

If they'd patch the frame rate to be more flexible I'd be satisfied. Fortunately the community tweaks allow me to enjoy this game.
 
Ehren8879 said:
At 45 fps physics and animations seem to be fine. I find this to be a good balance of fps and eye candy for my 6950. I have lighting at high, reflections and effects at low with SSAO. During the daytime I have performance to spare, but GPU utilization starts peaking out during intense nightime runs from cops.

If they'd patch the frame rate to be more flexible I'd be satisfied. Fortunately the community tweaks allow me to enjoy this game.
Click to expand...
did you only adjust fps? there is 2nd parameter that makes the game run at normal speed including physics. the only downside is that you get 1.5x faster emp lockons and apparently you take more damage on direct contact.

bonus clip: game hates me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-i-yiBaDAk
i was chasing a guy for like 20 minutes, and everytime i got real close, like 0.3km, something like this happened.
 
Rean said:
did you only adjust fps? there is 2nd parameter that makes the game run at normal speed including physics. the only downside is that you get 1.5x faster emp lockons and apparently you take more damage on direct contact.

bonus clip: game hates me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-i-yiBaDAk
i was chasing a guy for like 20 minutes, and everytime i got real close, like 0.3km, something like this happened.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I set both params. I haven't noticed any weird physics issues. Also, I haven't tested the before and after effects of EMP lockon or damage
 
Looks like other commands from Battlefield work in this game as well. I decided that maybe disabling vsync would allow me to bump my frame rate, so I added:

-RenderDevice.VSyncEnable 0

to the command line. My FPS dip much less now, so I've been able to get to a steady 35fps, which is actually a world of difference from 30 (kind of like the difference between 25 and 30). I just set my refresh rate to 70, and the action is very smooth, it's hard to see any tearing even if I look for it.

Since most of the movement occurs on the vertical plane, tearing wouldn't be very noticeable anayway, but capping the framerate to half my refresh rate minimizes tearing further. This is on my CRT of course, but those of you with 120hz or 144hz monitors could really mess around with this and get some pretty good results.

I think I've found some areas that reveal some poor optimization, though. A few locations with lots of buildings and other complex structures will send me into the mid-20's, even on all low settings. I meet the recommended requirements, with an overclocked Q9650 and 8GB DDR2 ram, so this shouldn't be happening.
 
Yeah, after playing for a couple days, this game definitely has optimization issues. Seems that it's not utilizing the full CPU or GPU of most users. There are a few areas that have hotels, houses, and other structures that slow to sub-25 fps on most machines. It certainly does on my core 2 quad, and even for people with newer i7's.

Apparently EA never bothered to fix glaring issues in the last Need for Speed, so that doesn't bode well for this one. So really I just need to avoid their games like the plague. If a multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation can't be bothered to run QA on their games, then I probably shouldn't support them.
 
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For anyone playing this, please contribute to this thread on the EA Answers HQ and click the "me too" button to show EA that this thing is broken.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Need-for-S...ops/td-p/1866581/jump-to/first-unread-message

This can be a really fun game, but the momentum is just destroyed when the game speed decreases by 33% in the middle of a race. Apparently EA botched the multithreading on PC and this game relies heavily on Core 0.
 
Rean said:
wow, you know it? man, i wish contest rules (those are videos for russian contest) didnt have 2:30 limit. emperor soundtrack is so good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOxuQBe_cL8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWtG3EkvSJg
i am so digging all of the harkonnen themes. david arkenstone did an amazing job.
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I probably have everything Westwood Studios related other than some of the old merch. All the in game songs I ripped from the mix files and the like. I liked Jarrid Mendelson and David Arkenstone a lot more than Frank Klepacki in Emperor as I didn't dig the orchestral direction for Atreides.

Speaking of game soundtracks NFS Rivals has terrible music compared to the older games which actually had electronic rock and techno that sounded like something you could race to without wanting to turn the music off and immediately pull out your older game soundtracks. High Stakes, Porsche Unleashed and V-Rally 2 had by far the best NFS soundtracks.
 
I ended up winning the racer portion of the game. The "plot" is unbelievably weak. I miss the different opponents from the first version of Most Wanted. This one builds up to racing an opponent...but it never happens.
To me the most fun thing to do is to drive on the open highway area and slam into other players using the electro-shock. With a fully upgraded McLaren it instakills most of the Italian supercars and will take out the more durable cars in 2-3 hits. I think that's more fun than playing as a cop since people never see it coming. I keep getting race challenges, which I'll randomly accept after wrecking the other players :p
 
I think someone on the EA support forum figured out what is causing the slowdown for everyone in this game. The common link between all the areas where massive slowdown occurs is breakable objects: barriers, tables, chairs, food carts, etc. They appear to not be multithreaded, so the game tries to render them with one core, and when it can't, the entire game slows down, no matter how powerful your rig is. Pretty lame.

And again, we should all be telling EA about this in the link above. It's messed up that we have to work this hard to get a fix, but it is what it is.


That said, I'm still managing to have fun. For me, this game is at its most fun when you run into another human player that's on the opposite team and they have a good connection to the host. Trying to ditch a cop, or not get ditched when you are a cop, is pretty intense.
 
Can someone tell me how the fuck law enforcement continues their pursuit of me when there's no cops around?
 
They tag your car via sat. Have teleportation devices to send cops directly 100 m in front of you or behind you.
 
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