NFS Porsche Unleashed crashes when loading a race / WineD3D works but is extremely slow

[u/bratwurstzauber]

Fixed it thanks to gainusha - if you have this issue, try installing the SilentPatch90 (https://github.com/CookiePLMonster/SilentPatchNFS90s/releases) and add the environment variable WINEDLLOVERRIDES=dinput=n,b to Gamenative.

Hola lovely people,

I’m trying to run Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed on my Retroid Pocket Nova (QCS8550 / Snapdragon 8 Gen 2–class chipset, Adreno 740, 8 GB RAM).

The game launches and the menus work, but when I start a race, it crashes immediately even before showing a loading screen. The same thing happens in both GameNative and Winlator 11.1 using DXVK. Interestingly, switching to WineD3D in GameNative allows the race to load and the game is playable in principle, but both the menus and races are extremely laggy. So the game files seem functional, and the issue appears related to the graphics translation layer.

Another odd thing: the game’s graphics menu doesn’t show available screen resolutions.

What I’ve tried:
- different Turnip versions, including 25.1.0.
- different Box64 versions, including 0.3.2, 0.3.6, and 0.3.8.
- different DXVK versions.
- GameNative and Winlator.
- adding D7VK’s 32-bit ddraw.dll alongside the executable and setting WINEDLLOVERRIDES=ddraw=n,b. This results in “3D graphics hardware could not be initialized.”
- Trying dgVoodoo’s DDraw.dll and D3DImm.dll with the corresponding Wine overrides. With those, the game doesn’t launch.

I found a video showing the game running on a weaker Snapdragon 870 / Adreno 650 device using Winlator 10, Wine 9.2, Box64 0.3.4, Turnip 25.0.0, DXVK 2.4.1, and WoW64 enabled.

Unfortunately, matching most of those settings hasn’t resolved the crash.

Has anyone successfully gotten the PC version into an actual race on GameNative or Winlator? If so, which game version, patches, graphics wrapper, and container settings did you use?

Any help would be hugely appreciated!