Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit PC Performance & Screenshots

The latest installment of the legendary series, Need For Speed, has just been released. As usual, it's time to see how well the PC version performs and if Criterion did a good job porting the game. Yeah, you read it right. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit for PC is simply a port from the console version, with all the cons of such a thing.

Although there is an option for High Resolution textures, Criterion didn't bother with taking advantage the additional raw power of the latest GPU's. Moreover, Criterion doesn't provide us with a lot of graphical options to adjust the game. FSAA is also not supported, although you can force it if you have an ATI card and Nvidia will likely support it with a better game profile in the next version of ForceWare. Graphically speaking, we have some great lighting effects and amazingly detailed cars. Stages are well designed, although they lack some fining details that would earn them some extra points. You won't notice their absence while driving, but still we'd like more environmental detail. All in all, Hot Pursuit is a nice game but nothing breathtaking!

NFS: Hot Pursuit is CPU bound, although you will be able to enjoy it even if you have a dualcore. We used a Q9650 @ 4.2Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295. At first, performance was not as good as we'd hoped to. This is mainly due to a bad SLI profile from Nvidia, as we got 30% usage in each of our cores. As a result, the game was running with 30-40fps at 1080p with max details. When we run the card to Single GPU mode, we had constant 60fps with 70-80% GPU usage.

As we can see, the game scales well with our quadcore. Hot Pursuit takes advantage of multicores and also scales down beautifully. Furthermore, when we set the affinity to two cores (to simulated a dualcore), we didn't witness any framerate drop. The game was running great with constant 60fps, even in our simulated dual-core. Of course we should point out that we were running at a really high frequency, so you may need to overclock yours if you're having frame drops.

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit performs amazingly in modern PC's, although it is a simple console port. The game scales well to both quadcores and dualcores and you will not encounter any significant problems with it. We highly recommend patching the game to 1.0.1.0 version, as it resolves some issues with the quadcores and adds some missing particles effects. We hope that Nvidia will provide us with a better SLI profile and an AA compatibility bit to force the AA via control panel. Enjoy the following screenshots and if you like it, buy it!