Need for Speed is currently loading, I’m going to give the first 10 hours a shot and see if it’s worth it. I appreciate they allowed it to scale to 4k and supported wheel hardware (assuming force feedback) but really don’t think it’s going to be anything earth shattering. They often go far too arcade. I don’t wish to play Ridge Racer. I want good old Road & Track: The Need for Speed

Video is a success! New drivers did the trick. 1080p/60
** NVidia Driver 364.51+ is a MUST for this game **

[update 3/11/2016 10:46] Attempting 4k resolution…
No 4k, and EA was no help. They said “nope, don’t touch that config file” and after 2 people and 45 minutes I finally got the answer – no, you can’t manually make it go into 4k (I’m on 1080 display)

[update 3/15/2016 19:04] Release day, unsure if it was the tiny update received for it, or the appearance of the profile in Nvidia GeForce Experience but that was the first place I went. it already had the 3840 x 2160 resolution listed — apparently picking up on my manual changes to the config file which hadn’t made a difference to the demo.

There was a little bit of flickering when I fired it up, but otherwise it worked and I was able to see it in it’s glory.

I made a quick first look video using my un-performancized NSX:

[update]
OK. First run down and, uh. It’s interesting? My first thought is “suck”, actually.
Why is everything so sparkly? It’s like a glitter-fest of sparkle everywhere. The glitter is diminished with AA enabled but I’d so love a dry city. Who even goes racing when it’s so moist? Everything was on ultra, turned down the AA to FXAA and turned off the motion blur to try and get it to perform sensibly. Otherwise it’s horrible performance w/ NVidia driver 362.00 — There is a ‘game ready’ update, however 364.51 which mentions NFS specifically, that’s installing now.

Besides the technical aspect, expect corny FMV. I believe the first title they did it for was the original Most Wanted. The one with the guy who sabotages your BMW right from the get-go. Spike? no, RAZOR! I knew it was something sharp! So expect some grade-A corn in your story line. You may expect that, and you may actually like that because it makes you feel like you have real people talking to you — ok fine, it happens to be their device for story delivery and it works for kids as well as adults so lets just set that aside for the moment.

What does the game have, what does it lack? Here are thoughts in random order!

• There is no dash cam, despite the beginning FMV from inside the car where you can see the dash. Other games have done that, you have the hood cam — but the bumper cam is WAY too low! I’m then relegated to the closest tail cam. Not my favorite.
• I’m playing with the XBox One controller but I can’t quite get a feel for it due to all the stuttering. It’s getting anywhere from 30 to 72 to 120fps it’s all over the place.
• The city seems very small
• SO MUCH FRIKKIN GLITTER
• no screenshot button? PRT SCR does not work either. Add it to steam to get the overlay if you like the F12 – found it! (push in right stick on controller)
• Why is everyone so friendly?
• The actors in the crowd scene are very diverse. There are the models, the twigs, but they’re interspersed with real people. That’s refreshing.
• some of these actors look far too old
• this looks like a hip game that tries way too hard, were expert teenagers consulted for this project? it feels like it lacks authenticity
• The choice of performance parts is limited
• The parts you can upgrade are a laundry list of everything anyone who thinks they might know might want to change… I’m looking at you: replacement exhaust headers
• You can’t paint individual parts of your car (hood)
• The only hoods I can buy are carbon fiber – covered it with a decal
• The sticker / decal interface is ok — but different keys for delete layer from the front/back and side/side – Y for the side and X for the front/back, that seems like an oversight

Depending on how the video came out I’ll be putting that up once it processes. I have some 3D and some not 3D but framerates might not be good enough to bother. I can at least grab some screens from it if nothing else, though.

[update 3/10/2016]
Complete fail on the video. All that was left was MP4s encoded with an NVidia overlay and audio. Otherwise everything was black. There were no temp files left to try and re-encode. I purposely used the NVidia recorder to save the video for max quality, rather than stream it to twitch and encode it to YouTube from there. There is so much fast camera / action it’s going to be a mess with any kind of compression. I’ll try again after the updated driver.