Halp Me: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit: Sucky FPS

[icupnimpn2]

Halp me!

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
ATI Radeon HD 5750
Windows 7 64
Ram 3 gigs

NFS: Hot Pursuit plays like molasses, or treacle (whatever that is, you Brits).

I'm wondering whether it's a processor bottleneck since I've seen youtube videos of other 5750s playing it find. Have tried messing around with affinity while the game is running to help share the load between processor 0 and 1. I see more balanced % usage but FPS doesn't improve.

Right now, with all options on minimum, I get between 6-18 FPS. Screen resolution does not seem to affect much. That is, 1200 x 800 performs only marginally better than 1680 x 1050.

The only other game I've had similar problems with is King Arthur The Roleplaying Wargame, where low FPS did not seem dependent on my video settings.

Will take any reasonable advice.

[slick_101]

Just had a look at the minimum specs and your processor just scrapes into the minimum. Have you tried over clocking your CPU and seeing if that makes any change?

[icupnimpn2]

I have not delved into that yet. I am a little afraid of overclocking and maybe am obstinate about not doing it since the PC runs great for 99% of what I want to do with it. It's just when an oddball comes along like this NFS game... is it worth overclocking just for one game? I don't know. I'd do it if the risk were minimal. Any quick tips?

The game does have problems running on dual or multi core. When I start it, it maxes out one processor, so task manager will show constant 50% usage. I can get it to run across both processors by right clicking on the process and changing the affinity so that core 0 is off for about 10 seconds or so. Then the other core takes the full load and it still shows 50% utilization overall. I switch core 0 back on and I see a balanced load of about 66%. The processors aren't completely maxed out, so I'm wondering if the bottleneck is somewhere else.

Then again, even if I can trick the game into sharing some of the load between processors that doesn't mean it is doing it well. It's very possible that you need an individual core to be faster than any of my individual cores since the game is so poor at making use of the multiple processors.

[slick_101]

Well I've just been reading this up and I've found out that this game isn't very well optimised for an older generation processor (as your processor is more than 5 years old). I Also found out that the game is very CPU hungry so sadly the only thing I could suggest is a little CPU tweak or for you could try and find a cheapy quad core as that might be able to help out

[icupnimpn2]

s'what I was afraid of. I appreciate the advice.

[Gnoupi]

Just in case, do you have Anti-Aliasing forced in the graphical card driver?
I was annoyed by the lack of AA option in the game, and when reading about the problem on other forums, it appears that it works badly with forcing in catalyst, if you set more than 4x.

Probably not your issue, but just in case.

[icupnimpn2]

Good looking out, but no, I have "application managed" selected, which I think is the same as "off"