Hope this will help.
This is the problem I encountered with this game: after updating directx, rebooting, installing and playing for a while, I started having some unexpected and totally casual slowdown during the game. At first I thought that my gfx (Mobility Radeon 9600 128, yes I'm a laptop owner) was dying, but after a while the game returned at its "normal speed". Then I read in this topic about Dual-Core issues. As my Laptop procio is a 3.06 HT, i tried the imagecfg trick, without luck. So I decided to try with other games which never gave me problems (PES 5, Madagascar and Painkiller Black Edition). And, surprise surprise, also Mad and PK had continuous slowdowns, while PES hadn't. I decided to reinstall my OS and after that the first and only game I installed was NFS. Again, same problem, also with other games.
Today, I reinstalled Windows again; but then I tried with Madagascar and Painkiller. Guess what? No more slowdowns. I don't know if NFS modifies also System32 directory files, actually I can only think that directx dlls which come with the game aren't suitable for my gfx card.
If someone experienced the same probs, please post here his opinion, I would appreciate.
Oh, just the last thing: I tried setting the game at min res and min details, then at 1024x768 mid-high details and v-sync enabled: it was choppy anyway. How is it possible? -----> The game is crap, and programmers should be ashamed to consider "complete" a game like this, which is programmed with feet. Anyway, they will never see my money again, maybe next time they will concentrate more on beta-testing and less on copy-prot.
