Wow, I cant believe it. I used to be playing Need for Speed Underground with everything except motion blur and light trails on (and NO AA or AF, i disabled them) because it brought it down to 7 FPS, even at 640x480 resolution.

BUT... something happened. I have a Chaintech Ge Force FX 5200, overclocked to 315/400 (core/mem) and even then it lagged with those two settings on (7 FPS like before)

Well, what happened is that I've had this Ge Force for a while now, is it at all possible a piece of hardware gets BETTER while it gets older?

Thats what happened with my Ge Force FX 5200, generally a weak card but now, for some reason, I can play it WITH both motion blur AND light trails on at 25 FPS.

Whats even stranger is now I'm running it WITH 2x AA and 4x AF and it runs at a very nice, smooth 20 FPS. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!

the settings now are: All game options maxed out, all settings on the card are topped out except AA (set to 2x) and AF (set to 4x). The clock speeds didnt affect the card at all before, and I have no artifacts.

reason for this post:

WHAT IS GOIN ON??

You ran windows update?

Only other thing I could think of would be is if there was a patch for the game that you recently installed.

could be the peak before the burnout

I havent updated windows yet, I'm runnin the same drivers as I was before (i think its 5.403 or somethin) and burnout? does it overheat at all before it burns out and dies or can it just come unexpectedly, because the computer temp is a constant 31 degrees (my dad says its impossible unless its hydro-cooled, apparently thats not true lol)

I have no clue what happened, I just played it one day and it worked so much faster and better. I'm the only one who uses this computer for purposes other than gaming.

And I have had 1.4 for longer than this has been goin on, it started this about a month ago.

well, just take it as it gives you. If it's better now, don't change anything.

lol, I will! they say its a weak card but wow! i cant believe the performance I'm gettin outta it :S

Act of god?

Newer version of DirectX?? I guess that the game is using DirectX...

Alister

I thought Direct X 9.1B was the last one

I havent updated any hardware or software except the game itself, and even then it didnt work right before.... it just.... worked all of a sudden...

Don't touch it! Back away! Put police tape around it!

Heh, apparently my brother updated the drivers while I was sleepin (i didnt know there were new drivers until a little while ago) But those driver optimizations are just a wonder to behold. I mean just wow! never have I seen the FX run this fast before. Heh, i guess they got a new software writer or somethin,, but whatever happened, it worked!

i dont kno y urs had or still has problems but i got the same card and i got the settings all at peak and it works fine

its a 256 mb card right cos thats wat my´n is

mine is 128 MB, so it can't handle textures and AA/AF so well. I also have the GeForce FX Go5200 and it's 64 MB and seems to run better than the full-sized version lol, even with lower clock speeds (190 core/210 mem i think, full size has 250 core, 300 mem... mine was anyway) and less memory (64MB)... of course AA and AF kill the little bugger, but other than that, it works great, even when running 2 displays (expanded desktop or cloned, either way it works).

And likely the reason yours runs better than mine (memory aside), I'm running it on a Celeron 2.3 GHz system (100 MHz FSB... -_-)