Widescreen Gaming Forum

Once again a poor, no a beyond poor port from the console is thrown our way with an extra serving of poop tossed in, not only are you paying top dollar but your getting piss poor performance, down graded graphics and if possible, even worse control optimization then the last one. For those of us with AMD cards, we get an extra special treat.. absolute and utter failure in every graphics dept. I myself so far , beyond the uncontrollable vehicle issue, have a stealth car, all black.. inside and out.. oh sure the high lights, reflection and specularity are there but it seems out of place on a black blob. I went back to the 11.3 drivers just because then latest 11.4 beta's almost gave my upgraded 6950-70 card a death blow in eyefinity mode.

So before i even bother to 'try' it in eyefinity I'd like to see if some smarty pants here can come up with some optimisations that will fix allot of the issues.

edit: in Catalyst AI turn off 'Enable surface format optimization' to get rid of the 'blackouts' on objects.

so far there is zero solution to setting p controllers for the PC version, most wheel owners have gone back to keyboard and mouse of all things..

My Eyefinity setup w/ 2 5870's in crossfire was having serious issues in Shift 2. I had the blacked/out stealth problem you mention as well as incredibly slow performance when other cars were on screen.

I've gotten it behaving just about perfectly by disabling Crossfire to fix poor framerates and renaming the executable to "shift.exe" without the quotes to fix the bugged-out textures/stealth black car.

I hope this helps on the 6x series too.

I also get the best performance running medium or no antialiasing with everything else maxed at 5760x1080.

Game unsupported by current AMD driver = piss-poor console port ? That's a new one. :|

I do kind of agree on some of the bad port arguments.

I mean my g27 with default settings was just laughable. Other games handle wheels a LOT better.

After fiddling with the advanced settings for an hour I almost feel like I'm not driving a swimming-pool down the track. The graphics are leaving alot to be desired as well.. I mean Dirt2 has me spoiled, but this game looks nothing close to that, yet runs at literally HALF the framerate on my 3 way 480's.. I'm hoping it's just driver issues, because the game doesn't look so nice that it should be bogging down 3 480's and a 6 core i7.

I've tried 4 different pads now, best one seems to be the Steel Series 3GC simply because of the taller dual sticks over the others and the higher resolution analogue output. and by 'best' i eman something that dosen't make me want to fly to England and give these tossers at, mad cow or upset bovine or whom ever they are, a nice glasgow kiss..

but then after stupidly making my way to lvl 9 i decided to try the first drifting game.. omg.. seriously, who designed the phsics, i don't think they've ever been in a car in their life, the drifting was worse then when I was trying to Ice race 2 years ago in a FWD escort with all seasons. It's so bad that if you just accelerate, don't touch the wheel to turn, just accelerate.. the car will randomly and violently swap ends, out of the blue.. i've experienced this with the 911 GT3 RS on the first Nuremberg time challenge but thought it was just me... it's not, the game simply does things without your input. And the gitter frame rate issues with my 6950/70 is epic.

That ws the last NFS i'll be buying, since undercover, things have been going south REALLY fast with this franchise. People need to start bugging Genki in Japan to make a new Tokyo Extreme racer, now that was an awesome game, I mean how many driving games now a days include weight reduction changes when a body kit is applied and also modify the in game cars dynamics to reflect those changes.. NONE and this is a game from the middle of the PS2 cycle! I keep my PS2 not for the GT games but for the Genki games.

I' going to take my NFS shift 2 game back into EB when it's busy , demand my money back, if I don't get it, I will make the biggest stink in the store then destroy the game and disk in the store.. love to see how that plays out when it gets back to head office.. or maybe i'm just being arrogant to think one person can make a difference.

Good luck trying to get yer money back. I never got into the Shift part of the franchise. And the previous NFS I have played was Carbon. And since EA and Criterion were too damn lazy to bother with a demo or something, I had to snag a bootleg copy of the new Hot Pursuit just to see if it was worth the money. It was not. And after a while, and a bug filing later, Criterion says some of the flaws that I have pointed out were "as designed." The game, which was originally US$20-25 value to me, got downgraded to being utter US$0 crap. And I uninstalled the game right after that.

I never got into the NFS franchise at all. I figure I'd give it a run and see how it goes. Carbon was pure junk when it comes to drifting on that game, because you didn't have to do anything to really start drifting. It's just accelerate and steer. That's it. Once you turn the corner, it automatically starts sliding like it was on ice or something. I'm pretty sure that there's more to it than just sliding out of control like yer on ice.

The way things are now, NFS is nothing more than a milking franchise that is nothing more than the same old crap again and again. And with the devs being too damn lazy to bother with features that could have stood out of the console crowd, it makes me wonder if we'll ever see anything worthwhile as far as driving games goes.

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t3h bl0g | Old Warriors Soceity | my BFBC2 stats

one thing that really stood out to me, and annoyed me for no good reason, was the recycling of old models, First place i noticed it was on that stupid starting grid, those umbrella girls, they have been using the same models, and walk cycles for over 6-7 years now. the Tokyo track is simply the same old track with a slight rework a few extra animations on the , again ever annoying pre race evolve, a few new textures and some flash bang environmental and light effects. Those are the two off the top of my head but i've seen more and if i don't end up wasting my time at EB I bet we'll see even more recycled crap, but why am i surprised , every need for speed had recycled models, and in the case of Undercover, whole sections of 'area's were cut and paste.

Guy's, I have to disagree.. if you are playing Shift 2U... you need to read this review, a Fair and Honest Review. Sure S2U needs some tweaks, which game doesn't, but its a great game, though not Full Sim, A Blast and runs well on my older E8650 w/paliti 1GB and with AA off I average 38-42FPS

See Link: http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-unleased-review/#more-12354

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, it is safe to say that Shift 2 Unleashed is not more of a simulation “than anything out there”, Slightly Mad Studios’ second NfS title is a major improvement over the first Shift in pretty much all regards though.

Shift 2 Unleashed finally offers believable physics that provide a good driving experience even without any community mods. Once you move past the hassle of getting your wheel dialed in, Shift 2 Unleashed manages to impress with unrivaled graphics & some of the best content ever packed into a racing title.

The title exceeds the competition with an exceptional sense of speed & immersion and an in-depth car tuning mode that will keep racing fans entertained for a long time.

The fair and straight forward career mode makes Shift 2 accessible even to sim racers who are used to just pick a car & drive with no frustration involved. Sim racers who consider everything but iRacing or netKar Pro to be arcade won’t like Shift 2 too much, everyone else should consider giving Shift 2 a go as the sensation of driving a powerful sportscar on a track like the Nordschleife at night is worth the admission price alone.

One can only hope that EA allows the Shift franchise to further advance in this direction as the title fills a big void especially on the PC as stunning-looking driving titles that offer lots of content and maintain a certain level of realism have been a console only-thing until now – Shift 2 Unleashed successfully changes that.

Guy's, I have to disagree.. if you are playing Shift 2U... you need to read this review, a Fair and Honest Review. Sure S2U needs some tweaks, which game doesn't, but its a great game, though not Full Sim, A Blast and runs well on my older E8650 w/paliti 1GB and with AA off I average 38-42FPS

See Link: http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-unleased-review/#more-12354

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, it is safe to say that Shift 2 Unleashed is not more of a simulation “than anything out there”, Slightly Mad Studios’ second NfS title is a major improvement over the first Shift in pretty much all regards though.

Shift 2 Unleashed finally offers believable physics that provide a good driving experience even without any community mods. Once you move past the hassle of getting your wheel dialed in, Shift 2 Unleashed manages to impress with unrivaled graphics & some of the best content ever packed into a racing title.

The title exceeds the competition with an exceptional sense of speed & immersion and an in-depth car tuning mode that will keep racing fans entertained for a long time.

The fair and straight forward career mode makes Shift 2 accessible even to sim racers who are used to just pick a car & drive with no frustration involved. Sim racers who consider everything but iRacing or netKar Pro to be arcade won’t like Shift 2 too much, everyone else should consider giving Shift 2 a go as the sensation of driving a powerful sportscar on a track like the Nordschleife at night is worth the admission price alone.

One can only hope that EA allows the Shift franchise to further advance in this direction as the title fills a big void especially on the PC as stunning-looking driving titles that offer lots of content and maintain a certain level of realism have been a console only-thing until now – Shift 2 Unleashed successfully changes that.

I can't agree with this at all. I feel like he's lying right to my face. I'm sure he's not, but I can't understand how someone likes this game.

I bought NFS S2U and I must say it sucks ass in its current state for Eyefinity. I have the original Shift and I've been playing that instead of S2U. If you really want to play Shift1 the way it's meant to be played go over to the NoGripRacing forums and download the Overhaul 2.0 mod (for handling) and the Better Shift Visuals 1.1 Mod (for graphics and better framerate performance) as well as several of the other mods. The mods really made a huge difference in gameplay. With the mods I've gotten Shift to run with higher resolution textures, more realistic car physics, and most importantly smoother and higher framerates. I jumped from averaging 45 fps to 75 fps using the mods. There is a little work involved with unpacking the game though.

All the S2U cars feels like I'm driving on a cloud and there's a ton of input lag on my G27. Also the graphics in S2U are terrible and I get awful framerates (15 fps) with everything maxed out. Hell, I still get terrible framerates (35-40 fps) and stuttering with AF, AA, and v-sync turned off and all settings on medium. My rig isn't the best but I would at least think that it could run S2U reasonably well. I'm not trying to knock S2U for its physics (I plan to use community mods for that). I'm not knocking it for its features because it has a lot of features and it looks to be a very good game with a lot of potential. It's just that the input lag and the terrible graphics kill the game for me. Once they optimize the code for PC and hopefully for Crossfire and Eyefinity and fix the input lag I'm sure this game will be awesome. So until EA and SMS release a patch for S2U I'm going to be sticking with my modded version of Shift1.


My rig:
CPU: AMD 1100T Hexcore BE (stock)
Mobo: Asus M4879T-Deluxe
RAM: OCZ Reaper 8GB
GFX: 5870 2GB E6 Edition (2 in Crossfire running Eyefinity on 3x1L Asus VW266H)
Logitech G27
Audio: Xi-Fi Titanium