Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Performance Report

After playing Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for the Personal Computer extensively today, I can safely say that it is the most beautiful racer I have ever played to date. Hot Pursuit doesn't have the hyper realistic look of the graphical perfection found in Dirt 2 but what makes up for it are the expansive and imaginative environments that provide a truly grandiose sense of space within the game unlike anything I have ever seen before. You can see so far into the distance and the vistas are usually composed of prominently stunning landmarks.

You can always find a huge satellite dish or two in the desert.

I am able to run the game at native 1920 x 1080 with all of the graphics settings set to maximum on my PC at  a constant 60 frames per second but the frame rate stutters every so often where it could drop all the way down to the low 30s for a couple of seconds at random moments during the race. There are very little customization options that can be accomplished graphically however, a clear sign that Criterion Games didn't fully optimize the experience for us PC gamers beyond the usual resolution bump and perhaps some possible texture and shadow detail improvements.

What are you going to do when you see this in your rear view window?

There is a very strange glitch in the game where the pretty flare and bloom effects would sometimes be disabled when I start the game (there is no toggle for it in the options menu) but it can be remedied by minimizing the application and then maximizing it again - a solution that I discovered by accident while I was switching between the game and something on the desktop that I needed to check on. The game also doesn't offer an anti-aliasing option but I hardly ever use that on my PC games so I didn't enable it via my graphics card. The aliasing is hardly noticeable due to the high resolution but you can probably see it in these screenshots I took because I had to resize them at a 50% reduction. Many have complained on the official forum that the game crashes often and I experienced that twice within the span of an hour. After the second crash, I reduced the memory clock speed of my graphics card and that seems to work so far.

♪Blue blue skies...♪ Wait, that's a different game.

I have only tried the online play briefly and as expected, there were not too many people playing the game the last time I joined the matchmaking queue. Maybe people are just enjoying the single player so far since I am really loving that myself. Still, I need to find people to add to my friends list since the single player mode has a very competitive friend leaderboards that everyone should take advantage of to awaken the social aspect of the game.

Tricks = Boost, Boost = Speed... Wait, that's a different game as well.

Update Note: 11/27/2010 - The first patch for the game has been released. and now, the lighting effects issue mentioned above has been resolved.