WRecord discussion

[rcgldr]

Although my lap times aren't close to world records, I can offer some tips:

For high speed tracks like Spa and Willow Springs, the Zonda R with zero downforce or 0 front 1 rear seems to be best. My best times at Nordschleife are also done with 0/1 downforce, but I can only run about 6:15, so I'm not competitive. At Willow, I'm close at 1:08.2, but at Spa I'm only 2:04.6. For the slower tracks, the Z06 with high downforce seems to be best.

The amount of bouncing and grip in NFS Shift seems to vary depending on your PC, so you may need to adjust them depending on your system. The patch is supposed to fix the bouncing, but there is still an issue related to the video card you use (see below).

On my system, manual shift, all assists and autoclutch off is fastest. Autoclutch off with manual shift in to 1st gear before start results in very fast launch. You can shift without clutch and autoclutch off on most cars (some will spin the clutch). With ABS off, manually downshifting while braking is faster. You can also downshift into a low gear while at high speed and full throttle just before braking. This isn't needed on the Zonda R or Z06, but it helps with the EVO IX that most players use for a 10.0 car.

Some players report that setting TC to high helps. It does keep some cars, like the Z06 from bouncing as much, but I don't get any improvement in lap times, and it messes up the otherwise very fast autoclutch off launch. Other players report setting steering assist to low helps, but again, it didn't help on my system, and lap times where about the same, and I had to fight the steering assist when trying to go inside of the track when going over jumps.

Braking stops or reduces the car bouncing. At Nordschleife, there are a few problem bouncy spots where I approach fast and brake hard while going over them to prevent or reduce bouncing. However there are also problem bouncy spots where the car is accelerating, and all I can do is ease off the throttle a bit while the car bounces a little. Zonda R isn't too bad, but the Z06 is slowed down too much by this on my system.

There's also a bug that I call the "seam" bounce. Note that the surface of the track you see is not the surface of the track used for the game's physics. The game implements the physics of tracks as a huge number of flat triangles (if you've ever used the track editor for NFS4 - High Stakes, you'd know what these look like). This is aggravated when a car's suspension is compressed from a dip or on a banked track, like Rustle Creek or Dakota Tri-oval. The body of a car will snag on the seams between sets of triangles, causing the car to bounce badly and going off into the wall. The Nissan GTR SpecV (R35) used for 14.0 events will do this badly if you have a body kit installed at Rustle Creek. In my case I removed the body kit and used a seam welded chassis, it still bounces, but not as badly.

You can download this savefile which has cars setup for online play for baseline setup, except I change downforce on Zonda R to 0 front, 1 rear.

http://rcgldr.net/nfss/nfss.zip

The Zonda R in that save should be used for most tracks, and the Z06 with high downforce 44/50 for short tracks like Alpental or Tokyo. The Z06 will bottom out at about 160 mph => 255 kph, but this isn't an issue for the short tracks.

Unfortunately, the patch may not fix the stutter / peformance issue. According to this review of patch 1.2 and updated ATI drivers. From page 7 of this review, they note that the ATI HD4870X2 results in stutters and control issues compared to the HD5870, even though frame rates are the same.

Here, we see the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 4870 X2 almost as equals, with the HD 4870 X2 taking a small lead. Though the difference in framerates is small, the difference in gameplay was huge. Using the HD 4870 X2 at 2560x1600 with 24X CFAA, the game was not smooth at all. It was choppy and there was a huge amount of input latency. It took longer for the car or brake to turn after we pressed the button telling it so, and so we crashed a lot more.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/...performance_iq

What this means is that the game doesn't play the same on all PC's. Not as extreme as the HD4870X2 at max settings, but there's still a difference. It's a shame because the older NFS games never had this problem. NFS2 -> NFS5 had a controller input based replay system, which guaranteed that all PC's played the same (or else the replays wouldn't work when players traded them). In 4 years or so of game play with NFS2 -> NFS5, the community of players only encountered one PC that affected the peformance of NFS4 - High Stakes (making it run 3% faster), and only when that system was overclocked; if that system was run in standard mode, it ran OK. EA took out the replay system with NFS6 - Hot Pursuit 2. I don't know if there were system sensitive issues with NFS6. NFS7 - Underground 1 - was the first NFS game known to have system sensitive issues. The original version (what you get just after installing the game) ran incredibly fast on fast systems, (but so did the game clock). The later patches reversed the situation, slower PC's got faster lap times, mostly because slower PC's didn't lose speed after landing from jumps, bouncing off walls, or just taking corners, as much as faster PC's did, depending on the track, it was about a 2% to 4% difference.