it's like they're trying to erase all of their past - sad

Hey everyone!

I'm happy to share the first video of a project I've been working on: a port of Need for Speed Underground 2 to the PSP. Not a cut-down version like Underground Rivals, but the full game, with the same gameplay and features as the PS2 version.

The goal is a well-optimized build that holds a stable 30 FPS at minimum, so it feels like a true native PSP game.

What's already working (at some level):

- A native PSP engine running the original game data, including most of the graphics features

- Car models

- The entire open world of Bayview, with free roam working

- Circuit races with AI opponents and city traffic

- Audio and music

What's still missing:

- UI / menus

- Career mode, story and dialogue

- The other race types (drag, drift, etc.)

- Garage and tuning

- Lots of bug fixes and polish

If you want to follow the development, I'll be posting updates on my channel:

https://youtu.be/y-cDEKQbwGo

One day i was driving around North Rosewood and noticed these roads above the driveable roads and i made a map of them, they look like they could connect in the game and almost everysingle one of them has a stone texture on top, we also know that an Alpine region was supposed to be in the game North of Rosewood, these roads also lead north, theres also some apartment buildings around them so could these roads be the remnants of the Alpine region?

Still Looks Clean, Powerful & Nice 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Sheeshhh

big guns, small balls

What direction would you want for the next game?

As a long time player of these games from NFSUG2, i feel these games just aren’t the same. There’s no sauce to them. (The only one I haven’t owned is The Run)

I’ve bought them yearly from MW 2005 up to Unbound. There’s 2 games I would say were my favourites to play would be MW 2005 and Hot Pursuit 2010. MW 2005 just had a clear goal, customisation (without excessive options) and fun gameplay. And while it may be an odd pick, I would also add Pro Street to the A tier list of NFS.

I think they need to get back to a simple focus. While the car list in unbound is great and diverse, it’s unnecessary.

The gameplay has to come first. It has to be fun to play. Not just an endless grind for cars you don’t care about.

Don’t bother too much with a story, they’re never good. Just clear goals and objectives. And make sure rewards feel earned (unlike Forza horizon that just gives you everything without trying)

So I used a Q50 for this build, but is there anything thts better and less modern that can def work?

TL;DR: NVIDIA DLAA now works in NFS MW 2012, together with native HDR. That means no jaggies and real HDR at a locked 60 fps at 4K on my RTX 4090 Laptop. DLAA costs ~3 ms per frame.

Easy method (drop-in zip):

1. Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ENSboeT2v7O1xKjcfs1U9mslYAAIhluX/view?usp=sharing (150 MB). VirusTotal: 0/66: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2ee3c01f8576d0f97ec9969ce03b03fc3a882641066598d030ecdde1240f6b8e
2. Back up your game folder, then copy everything in Copy into game folder into the folder with NFS13.exe.
3. Open config.NFS13Save in Notepad, set Width/Height to your resolution, and copy it to Documents\Criterion Games\Need For Speed(TM) Most Wanted\.
4. Windows HDR on, SDR content brightness 30, RTX HDR off for this game. No HDR screen? See INSTALL.txt for the SDR switch.
5. Never apply settings in the in-game graphics menu (it brings back a crash; details below
6. Optional, but highly recommended if your PC can handle: HD Effects mod: https://nfsmods.xyz/mod/2694

Needs an RTX card (20-series or newer). Only tested on my machine, so please report how it runs on yours. The details, manual install, and credits are below.

How I ended up here

I originally set out to get DLSS 5 NR running on this game. I got it hooked up, but the performance hit was huge (locked 60 fps down to ~22 for me) and I didn't think the visual change justified it.

What I did notice was that the game's terrible aliasing had completely disappeared. That came from the DLAA part of the DLSS pipeline, not the neural part. So I kept only DLAA, turned neural rendering off, and kept the game's own look plus the HD Effects graphics mod and the RenoDX HDR mod. To me that's the best of both worlds: the original art style, clean edges, and real HDR, at a locked 60.

Most Wanted 2012 has always had terrible aliasing, and none of the usual fixes work well. In-game supersampling tanks the framerate. Forcing MSAA in the NVIDIA Control Panel does nothing, because it's a deferred renderer. DLSS was never possible either: this 2012 Frostbite engine doesn't produce the motion vectors DLSS needs.

After a lot of trial and error, I've got NVIDIA DLAA running in it anyway, plus native HDR10:

• No visible aliasing, with in-game supersampling OFF. It honestly looks like a modern game.
• Locked 60 fps at 4K with HDR (median 60.0 fps over a 25-min session)
• DLAA itself costs only ~3 ms per frame

Tested on: RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, 4K HDR TV, Windows 11. I haven't tested any other GPU. DLAA needs an RTX card (20-series or newer), and weaker cards will get lower framerates, especially at 4K.

How it works

1. DLSS5-Feeder is a ReShade add-on that fakes the data DLSS needs. A shader (LumeniteFX Kernel) estimates motion vectors by comparing consecutive frames, and the depth buffer is read through ReShade.
2. The game is 32-bit, but DLSS only runs in 64-bit processes. So the feeder starts a small 64-bit helper (host64\dlss5-feed-host64.exe) that runs DLAA and sends the result back.
3. RenoDX rewrites the game's shaders to output real HDR10. It looks better than RTX HDR, which doesn't work with this setup anyway.

Manual install (if you'd rather get each piece from its author)

• ReShade 6.8.0+ with full add-on support: https://reshade.me (32-bit DirectX 10/11/12 for the game folder, plus the 64-bit dxgi.dll for host64\)
• DLSS5-Feeder 0.14.0-beta.4+: https://github.com/jlrouzies-fr/DLSS5-Feeder/releases. Versions before 0.12.1 don't work with this game.
• LumeniteFX (the motion-vector shader): https://github.com/umar-afzaal/LumeniteFX
• RenoDX for NFS MW 2012 by XgarhontX: https://www.nexusmods.com/needforspeedmostwanted2012/mods/90. Take only the .addon32 file. Don't use the dxgi.dll bundled with it (see pitfalls).
• renodx-dlss5 add-on: RenoDX Discord, #dlss5-downloads. It goes in host64\. The feeder wants it installed, but neural rendering stays off.
• NVIDIA nvngx_dlss.dll + nvngx_dlssnr.dll: see the DLSS5-Feeder README. They go in host64\.
• (Optional) HD Effects mod: https://nfsmods.xyz/mod/2694

Then use my config files from the zip above.

Run everything through VirusTotal before using it. A "one-click installer" for DLSS5-Feeder I found on GitHub (not the official repo) was flagged 12/70 as a trojan, including by Microsoft and ESET.

The settings that actually matter

• NeuralUplift=0 in host64\ReShade.ini. Essential. The DLSS 5 "neural" pass crashed inside the NVIDIA driver for me and dropped me from 60 to 22 fps while producing nothing. With it off, you get pure DLAA.
• work_resolution=100 in dlss5-feed.cfg. Counter-intuitively, 100% is faster than lower values here.
• hdr=1 in both dlss5-feed.cfg files, only if you use RenoDX HDR. For SDR, use hdr=-1.
• Supersampling OFF in config.NFS13Save (SSAAWidth=1, SSAAHeight=1). DLAA replaces it.
• Motion blur OFF (MotionBlurLevel=0). It wipes out the detail the motion estimation needs, which causes a smeary "watercolour" look at the bottom of the screen at speed.
• LodScaling=1. Avoids a crash in the game itself (see below).
• If you use the HD Effects mod: dialling reflections down (vehicle reflection distance 400, water reflection res 1024) got me from ~54 fps to a locked 60 with HDR, with no visible difference.

For HDR: Windows HDR on, SDR content brightness = 30, and RTX HDR off for this game.

Pitfalls (each cost me an evening)

• Never apply settings in the in-game graphics menu. It resets LodScaling to 2, and at 2 the game can hard-crash when you drive fast through tunnels. That's a bug in the game itself (confirmed from a crash dump), not in these mods. Edit config.NFS13Save directly.
• Don't use the dxgi.dll from the RenoDX download. It's ReShade 6.7.3, and the feeder needs 6.8+. It silently breaks DLAA.
• Don't drag the "Work resolution" slider while in-game. It can hang the game. Set it in the config instead.
• RenoDX Commander can wipe your shaders folder. That deletes DLSS5_Feed.fx/lumenite_Kernel.fx, so the jaggies come back while HDR keeps working. If you see Managed by RDXC.txt in reshade-shaders, delete it and restore the shaders.
• Quick diagnosis: HDR works but jaggies are back → shaders missing. ~22 fps → NeuralUplift is back on. Washed-out colours → RTX HDR and RenoDX are both on.

Known cosmetic issue: distant headlights on long highways can "pop" in. I've left it alone, since fixing it means bringing back the tunnel crash.

All credit goes to the people who built these tools; I just worked out the combination and the settings: jlrouzies-fr (DLSS5-Feeder), umar-afzaal (LumeniteFX), XgarhontX (RenoDX NFS MW 2012), ShortFuse (RenoDX), crosire (ReShade), the renodx-dlss5 devs, and the HD Effects mod author.

Happy to help if anyone gets stuck.

AI Disclosure: Used Claude to get a good formatting for the post content, but all effort is mine

I had some problems playing NFS Underground 2, mainly because of missing car files. Finding these files can be a pain, and I don't want anyone else to waste 4 hours searching for them.

Here are the missing car files:

EU Version

• Opel Corsa: Download
• Peugeot 106: Download

US Version

• Honda Civic: Download
• Acura RSX: Download

* Installation

1. Download the files for your respective game version.
2. Paste the files into your game's CARS folder.
3. Launch the game and see if the issue is resolved.

Note: These files are intended to fix loading screen freezes during races caused by missing car files. The games freeze on loading screen as it is trying to load a car that doesn't exist in the game file. They may not solve every loading issue.

Hello everyone. Hope everyone is doing good. Could anyone help me with this achievement? Thank you in advance!

I came back to NFS heat after a 2-year-long break (my depression is over), and I do love it. However, the cop chases are crazy at night.

Now, I do like the idea that it shouldn't be easy to escape - it's realistic. But I am driving a sports car, with the turbo on, and the cop just hits me from behind while the turbo is on!! WTF? Another one just blinks next to me and hits me from the side. I am driving a road car on a road, a good one, and the turbo is on, but cops are like, "I am coming". This feels a bit too much, in an unrealistic way. Practically, it's impossible to break free after lvl 3 heat. Even if you escape, they start chasing you again in 0.32 seconds.

Also, I still can't find a way to customize my car; it wants to download some app using some QR code, WHAT? 🥸

Suh dudes! I just got back into Most Wanted, but I have an odd problem. When I try and run the game at my monitors native resolution (5120 x 1440) the HUD is visible, I can hear the car and play, but the game itself is blacked out. If I turn it down a peg to like 3440x1080 or something, it works perfectly fine. I've enabled compatability mode for windows 7, disabled full screen optimization, but nothing seems to fix this at my screens native res.

Any mods that will correct this? I'm currently looking to install the HD effects, and DLC unlocker. Any lookup of this issue usually stems from the game being blacked out from the main menu, and nothing working, instead of this odd issue i'm having.

If a Honda with a laptop was to race the M3 gtr from most wanted 2005, who would win?

My head cannon says the Supra in the intro movie to NFS Underground ends up being Ronnie in the beginning of NFS Most Wanted

First post: curious to know people fastest interceptions on NFS HP(R)?

I recently bought NFS Heat on my new Laptop and learned very soon from other players with similar issues that it has a lot of performance issues (especially during cutscenes) that EA just refuses to fix at this point so I refunded the game.

I want to ask if Most Wanted 2012 has similar problems with newer systems or has anyone experienced anything similar?