Played Need for Speed Underground 2 demo....

I'm sure many ATI owners will find this initial impression interesting as
NFSU was a hot seller on PCs(I upgraded to a 9800 just for NFS)
Just downloaded and played for about 2 hours the just released Need for
Speed Underground 2 demo...and my initial view is disappointing. On my 3Ghz
PC with Radeon 9800(oc'd) card the first thing that got me was the graphics,
which look several levels worse than the original!? For a start, with nearly
all the settings on max visual quality the city/world looks terrible,
nowhere near as detailed or impressive as the first game. The cars look
worse than the orginal, apart from a nice NOS flames effect which is pretty
cool. But my biggest disappointment of all are the babes in the crowd and
especially the ones that start the race- they look like badly drawn
playstation 1 characters! Nooooooooooooooooooo! What have they done to them?
Shame on you EA.
On the plus side, the only new impressive graphical effect is the rainstorm
graphics which has to be the most realistic I've yet seen. Pretty cool when
a thunderstorm starts up in the middle of a race i gotta say.
This demo is too close to the release date of the actual game to expect any
drastic improvements so I would expect this is pretty much what the final
release will look like. Something fishy altogether about the graphics - like
they could have been better but have been simplified to 'fit' in with the
console versions.
Gameplay seems O.K. and it does have that 'one more go' effect so nothing
wrong that.
I know graphics are secondary to gameplay but when a game as ground-breaking
visually and gameplay wise as NFSU is released, you'd expect the producers
to outdo the original by several levels. I was definitely expecting more
from this game after the first game used all available hardware so well -
something that was stated in the first game's documention.
NFSU 1 is one of my fav games of all time, certainly my fav racer of all
time so this sequel had something to live up to. So far it hasn't.

 

On the plus side, the only new impressive graphical effect is the rainstorm

How does this compare to the rain in NFS High Stakes? I always thought that
the night and rain combo looked cool, here's a link to a video:

http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/nfs4dc.wmv

 

Which drivers are you using? I use the 4.4's which until now were the
best all rounders for my 9700 Pro, but in the NFSU2 demo, all I see
are the car and roadside lights!

 

Which drivers are you using? I use the 4.4's which until now were the

I'm using the 4.9 beta Doom3 drivers - if you read the help file it actually
says 4.9 ATI drivers are strongly recommended for Radeon cards. Looks like
you'll have to dump the 4.4s to play this demo.

 

Thanks, I will try them

 

The effect is similar but better in Underground 2 - the rain is heavier and
road seems to become more reflective when wet so it overall the effect looks
better because there are more lights around and the illumination of the rain
by the headlights is better also. Only thing missing from Underground 2 is
the spray coming up from behind the vehicle. Maybe that's something they
will add for the release.

 

Has anyone tried the demo with cat 4.10? I am experiencing graphical
problems with cat 4.8 when using both [light trails] and [light glow] at the
same time. The readme.txt recommends cat 4.9, but if I'm gonna change I'd
rather go to 4.10.

 

I'm using the 4.9b's from Omega and it's looking fine.

One important tweak I found to improve the IQ is to turn off the
stupid ENHANCED CONTAST and even the FOG. Once I turned those off
along with light trails and motion blur it started to look more like
the 1st NFS:U. I still think the first one is about 20% better looking
and I think we can blame the consoles for the drop in IQ.

I really liked the replay feature!! I never understood why it was left
out of the first one considering the point of the game is to trick out
your ride and make it look cool.

Over all, it looks like I'll be getting this game when it hits.. but
again.. I'm sorry to see a little bit of "consolitis" effect the PC
version.

Pluvious


--------------------------------
thread start:

hq wrote:

I'm sure many ATI owners will find this initial impression interesting
as NFSU was a hot seller on PCs(I upgraded to a 9800 just for NFS)
Just downloaded and played for about 2 hours the just released Need
for Speed Underground 2 demo...and my initial view is disappointing.
On my 3Ghz PC with Radeon 9800(oc'd) card the first thing that got me
was the graphics, which look several levels worse than the original!?
For a start, with nearly all the settings on max visual quality the
city/world looks terrible, nowhere near as detailed or impressive as
the first game. The cars look worse than the orginal, apart from a
nice NOS flames effect which is pretty cool. But my biggest
disappointment of all are the babes in the crowd and
especially the ones that start the race- they look like badly drawn
playstation 1 characters! Nooooooooooooooooooo! What have they done to
them?
Shame on you EA.
On the plus side, the only new impressive graphical effect is the
rainstorm graphics which has to be the most realistic I've yet seen.
Pretty cool when a thunderstorm starts up in the middle of a race i
gotta say.
This demo is too close to the release date of the actual game to
expect any
drastic improvements so I would expect this is pretty much what the
final
release will look like. Something fishy altogether about the graphics
- like
they could have been better but have been simplified to 'fit' in with
the
console versions.
Gameplay seems O.K. and it does have that 'one more go' effect so
nothing
wrong that.
I know graphics are secondary to gameplay but when a game as
ground-breaking
visually and gameplay wise as NFSU is released, you'd expect the
producers
to outdo the original by several levels. I was definitely expecting
more
from this game after the first game used all available hardware so
well -
something that was stated in the first game's documention.
NFSU 1 is one of my fav games of all time, certainly my fav racer of
all
time so this sequel had something to live up to. So far it hasn't.

 

ea demo never represent the final product quality... :-\

 

well... I tried it out with the 4.10's and it appears to work fine. No more
graphical corruption with all the options turned on.

Now, with respect to the quality of the demo:

1. I loved the first NFSU.
2. I'm not impressed by NFSU2 - from what I've seen so far.
3. The visual quality of the models is just horrible compared to the first
NFSU
4. I'm not really fond of the motion blur.
5. I really don't know; I just had higher expectations I guess.

Bah... Where's HL2!

 

Well, as far as I remember, the original NFSU demo was visually pretty much
the same as the final product....

 

1. Me too.
2. Expected to be better, but not totally disappointing either.
3. The world being modelled simpler I get, since it's free roam/there's a
lot more of it than in the first nfsu. As for the cars, hard to say yet
judging from the few cars that can be seen.
4. Me neither, looks stupid.
5. Since the first one blew everyones eyes out....this should've been even
more impressive...it's not. Gameplay might still be interesting dispite the
visual disappoitment. There isn't much of styling/tuning available in the
demo to tell properly.

 

No such restriction for the PC version I'm afraid - with consoles and their
tiny memory spaces simpler models are unavoidable. I suspect the PC version
has used the graphical lowest common denominator for all the old reasons -
time and money. I was wondering how they could come up with a sequel in such
a short time and now I know. Most of the stuff has been reused from initial
console designs to save them time in having to improve the visuals.
Maybe another reason why they did the visuals this way was the massive
success of the first game, they wanted as many people as possible to play
the game so they designed it with ordinary PCs in mind- unlike the first
game which looked great on ordinary PCs but could use the extra power of
high-end hardware and it looked unbelievable.

 

Valid point. Though the demo runs slightly more sluggish on my setup than
the original game despite the simple models...could be just the demo
"problem".

 

4.10 here on 9600XT ultra no probs....1024x768

Firthy

 

The graphics look pretty nice on my system, here's a
sample video, both live onboard and replay views:

http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/n8d4971.wmv

I have ATI 9800 XT, using 4.10 driver.

 

It's not that the graphics aren't deserving of the adjective "good"; it's
just that compared to PC NeedForSpeedUnderground 1, they've taken a step
back. In order to decrease development time and support consoles at release,
EA has unfortunately opted for the, to quote HQ from above, "graphical least
common denominator" approach. This really f'n sucks. Just take a look at the
models - I could puke.

 

Exactly. It's not ugly. It's very good....But NOT AS GOOD as before, which
is really disappointing.

 

I was disappointed with the demo. I hope they fix the problems with it.
Here's what I found, if you're using they keyboard even if you have it set
to left,right,up,down it would only accelerate or decelate and no steer. I
had to use my joystick to steer while I used the keyboard for throttling.
(Yes I checked the keyboard map). The interface is SLOW. I dunno why but
it's just retarded, it mouse speed should be the same as the one in the
windows options. Online play was a bust. The server browser never finished
listings games, there is no filter to remove games with passwords either and
it's only 4 players max.

But the most irritating thing was the "continue" button. There are icons on
top the screen and you have to use the scroll buttons on the side to move to
the selected items. You cannot just click on an inactive icon to activate it
(ugh). on the bottom two buttons. "back" and "continue". So you move the
scroll to options for example and then select "continue", and the whole
interface is like that. EA should stop this stupid unified console/PC
interfaces, they are just stupid.

 

Not sure if a lot of people have this product...

Does the Act Labs Shifter and Clutch work in this game? I know it
didn't work for the first one. Any improvement on the second one?

Thanks.