As usual, you can only count on your fellow core brothers and sisters in arms to fix what multi-billion dollar corporations ship broken. By now, you may have heard about Need for Speed Rivals and the inexcusable hard-lock of the 30 frames per second issue plaguing PC gamers? Well, another gamer found a fix... sort of.
Reddit user Kudoboi posted a link to a Guru3D forum post that offers a solution to the 60fps issue that has plagued many PC gamers running Need for Speed Rivals. The thing is, the game doesn't have an option to run native 60fps from within the game options. It's hard-locked to 30fps in order to maintain cross-platform parity on home consoles with Ghost's new “AllDrive” system, which is like the evolutionary step up from the “Autolog” system EA was using a few NFS titles ago.
Well, the user found a fix for the 60fps bug that caused NFS Rivals to speed up to the point of being unplayable. Anyone trying to run the game at 60 frames per second would find that the game's runtime would also speed up twice as much, making it next to nigh impossible to play, as showcased in the video below.
The fix from Guru3D user BetA, suggests adding the following to the command line when running Need for Speed Rivals:
-GameTime.MaxSimFps 60 -GameTime.ForceSimRate 60.0
The above line hard-locks the game and simulation cycles to 60 frames per second. As he understands it, BetA notes that the sim time being 60fps and the sim rate being 60fps matches both the game speed and the simulation operations to the same frames-per-second wave length. If the MaxSimFps is 30 and the ForceSimRate is 60 the game will run at a full 60 frames per second but at half the speed. Just the same as the opposite was true when running the game time at 60fps with the SimRate at 30fps, where the game was running twice as fast at only half the frames.
Essentially, the command line above brings parity to the frames and simulation runtime executions so everything is in synch. How well this affects multiplayer remains to be seen, but users on the forum thanked BetA for the information and have confirmed that it does indeed, work.
The only drawback is that if you're going to run the game at 60fps and expect it to work, you have to have a computer to match the required performance of the game at 60fps. If your PC can't handle it and the game dips down below 60fps, you're not just going to see dropped frames, you're going to run into actual slowdown of the entire simulation process, the same way that the physics and simulation were sped up when running the game at 60fps on the 30fps simulation cycle.
According to an Electronic Arts community manager on the EA forums, they got word directly from Ghost regarding the game's FPS issues, writing...
“Hi guys, we would like to let you know that we have forwarded your comments to the Team regarding this topic. Also they have the following to say:
'Running at 30 fps provides a smooth experience when driving in this open world powered by AllDrive. We are listening and targeting 60 FPS in the future.'”
It's unlikely that the issue will be patched for Need for Speed Rivals given the manual command-line fix that users can activate on their own or add to the executable path. It would have been better to simply have an option in the options menu, but then that would have broken the “AllDrive”, according to Ghost.
I just have to say, this does not bode well for the future of AAA titles being ported to PC from home consoles. I hope this particular case is isolated and we don't see more of these PC-gimping features implemented into multiplatform games throughout this eighth gen of gaming.
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