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.

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

Who ever wrote that has some connection or involvement with SMS, there is no way someone can be that clueless and be a game reviewer at the same time, He's saying there are things that are working perfectly, that even SMS admits are not working right.. ??

Any credibility this person might have would have been pissed away with this article, I dislike dullards who write lies simply to trick people into buying crap and in the process padding their pockets of the designers, this also precipitates down to a key fact; the more people buy the crap.. the more the companies will continue to make it.. PC's are not consoles, Even your modest computer specs are 8x or more the processing power of a 360, of course it will run 'well'.

http://www.simbin.se/ download GTR demo, this is a game thats from the end of 08' I think, then do a search for GTR game mods.. then kick yourself in the nuts when you realize how dumb your statement about Shift 2 is...

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

Well, at least it looks like we might get some fixes to this broken pile soon.

"Hi,

My name is Martin Griffiths and I'm PC Lead on SHIFT 2 Unleashed. I'm going to use this post to give you some background on our engine and what's coming up in the first patch.

SHIFT 2 has a completely new engine which is a deferred, light pre-pass renderer. A basic overview of this rendering method can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading .

Our deferred renderer is far from basic though - the rendering team at SMS has about 100 man years of render coding between us, and we used some of the most advanced techniques that are known at this time. We did our best - so it's sometimes disappointing after so many late nights to see flippant remarks, over constructive criticism.

So, this new engine allowed us to do cool things such as the night racing that would have been very difficult with an old style forward renderer. With deferred rendering the lighting stage is separate from the geometry stage(s) and hardware anti-aliasing like MSAA in a basic form won't produce correct results. Solutions to allow us to anti-alias had to be found - we came up with two methods to balance AA processing cost/quality over a wide range of PCs. A very large amount of time was spent on this and while some other developers just choose to do a post-pass edge detection filter we weren't satisfied with that, the 'HIGH" method for example was 3 months of R&D.
There are lots of 'tips' about overriding the AA mode - doing this will produce problems with lighting at edges and will also break other lighting components like Bloom, giving a visual look that we didn't intend. If you prefer the look with a driver over-ride then we've no problem with that - but the graphics team wanted a consistent look and feel, to do the many artists who created the tracks and cars justice.

There has been some confusion that our anti-aliasing uses the CPU - it does not. In the graphics options the 'Normal' mode uses MSAA with a special sampling trick to produce correct results at triangle edges - the 'HIGH' method extends this with a depth based search which requires a GPU with high bandwidth because the shaders are sampling many depth pixels for each pixel in the scene. Any performance issue on particular hardware is down to the characteristics of that GPU - there isn't anything we can do about this without a driver update.

To better balance very high-end CPUs the patch will include a 3rd anti-aliasing method which is CPU based - MLAA. We are working with Intel R&D to add this. On quad-core (and above) systems this will allow AA without any GPU cost and little impact to the frame rate to what you see when running with AA turned off currently. This will also help AMD based quad-core too.

Some people have noted that the game doesn't scale well with SLI/Crossfire - SLI performance scaling doesn't just automagically happen, it requires quite close collaboration with the GPU makers. We've been in regularly contact with NVidia and ATI throughout the development of the game, with their performance teams feeding back on any areas where we could improve, pooling our expertise with theirs. About 6 weeks of programmer time was spent pre-shipping on SLI/Crossfire scaling - we needed another 4 weeks since we went gold because of the complexity of implementing this in such a large engine. Both GPU makers have devoted a lot of time to some complex issues.

So yes, the upcoming patch includes SLI/Crossfire scaling. To give you an example a GTX 295 will go from 48fps to nearly 70fps in 1080p. Also the rendering team found some further optimizations so that normal (non SLI) graphics performance should be 5-10% faster with the patch.

Input lag - we've solved the latency issues reported using some wheels. There was a dead-zone issue and a threading problem introduced very late in development that have been fixed.

Garage screen crashes/CTDs - a fast button press issue that wasn't seen during development is also fixed in the patch.

A black screen issue on starting a race requiring a pause/unpause to fix is also addressed. This was caused by a timing difference with the protection system.

NVision - some reverse/double stereo issues with the mirrors and environment maps have been addressed in the patch. NVidia very kindly provided us with more hardware for the render team to address this - Kudos to them for that.

There are also some more minor fixes in the patch - the above represent the vast majority. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask in this thread and I'll do my best to reply.

Regards,
Griff

--
Martin Griffiths, PC Lead, SHIFT 2 Unleashed, Slightly Mad Studios."

This long winded excuse could have been simply bypassed and solved if they had chosen to use Open CL and Phys-X to do the coding..

Differed shading is NOT new, it's a G/Z buffer multipass compositing technique I've used for over 15 years with just about every quality 3D imaging and compositing system on the market. ( same system is used in different ways to create DOF, and atmosphere in allot of games. ( Although not called ' differed shading' the same type of system can be seen in COD MW2 Afghanistan the Z buffer usage for depth tied to an atmosphere modifier to reduce visibility over a distance and G buffer to provide geometry shading on the downed C130 as an example.. )

So, this new engine allowed us to do cool things such as the night racing that would have been very difficult with an old style forward renderer.

Pretty Sure SIMBIN has been doing very well with dynamic night racing for ~ 5 years now..

There has been some confusion that our anti-aliasing uses the CPU - it does not... To better balance very high-end CPUs the patch will include a 3rd anti-aliasing method which is CPU based -

So it wasn't but now it is.. And i suspect that anyone with a high end CPU would have a fairly good GPU.. even so the min GPU for the game is still well above the 360 spec. Which is where this port came from, so it's just poor coding on their part ( relates back to first sentence). As the owner of a 'high end graphics card I'm annoyed that these companies continue to offload graphics work on the CPU.. lazy programming. I love how the AMD CPU is an afterthought

This will also help AMD based quad-core too

the work was done with Intel which I'm sure is not going to lend SMS any help on making the AMD CPU's look good.

We've been in regularly contact with NVidia and ATI throughout the development of the game, with their performance teams feeding back on any areas where we could improve, pooling our expertise with theirs.

SMS: " can you help us AMD to make Xfire work "
AMD: " yes.. it's called Open CL "
SMS; " no we don't want to use the right product for the job, we wan't something else that will end up as a hack job"
AMD: " good luck with that.. click"

( same conversation with nvidia but switch X-fire for SLI and Open CL for Phys-X)

(non SLI) graphics performance should be 5-10% faster with the patch.

So with the zero support/optimisation for ATi/AMD based cards, you'll get a 5-10% increase in crap..

Input lag - we've solved the latency issues reported using some wheels. There was a dead-zone issue and a threading problem introduced very late in development that have been fixed.

That has to be the most politic way of saying " our PC input is crap".. Good thing is, it would be really hard to screw it up even more..

Most of these issues were solvable with the very first sentence's solution, but obviously that would be way too logical. I really don't have a problem flaming these guys, all this time spent on the game to make it worse then the first one. They HAD the core starting point, it's not like a whole new engine was developed, they had already hit the limit of 360's performance so what we get o the PC is SMS's attempt to manipulate the 360 to give it more performance and in the process they make it useless for the PC.

whatever, NFS is a dead franchise to me, it's nothing but a re hashed money grab.

Oh and previously i stated SMS worked with SIMBIN.. I think it was Codemasters who might have worked with them on GRIP. I've forgotten.

To be fair to the guy madtech, they are using a superset of deferred shading, often called deferred lighting or light pre pass.

It is quite a new technique only surfacing in 2008.
Here's the original writeup on it:
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2008/03/light-pre-pass-renderer.html

A shader deferred is a shader denied.

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.

Ok guy's forget the article from Vituralr... though I do agree with it. The game does not Suck and it is very good and challenging. Please D/L this mod called MiniMod from Juls... follow instructions and you will see that the game is well done and that setting up your wheel or gamepad will be much easier.

Direct Link to MiniMod:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jx0gzox6i1f2bi1

Here is a link with a description... This Works Guys, Try it! :
http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-handling-minimod-released/