Need For Speed High Stakes Mods

[Shameka Roessler]

Ive recently rebuilt a computer with a Compaq Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (183MHz Core/Mem factory). Trying it out with Need for Speed High Stakes I can get choppy performance at 1024x768@16-bit color and settings at full. I have tried dropping a few selections like no chrome... far draw distance... no car shading which is slightly better in performance but a bit choppy still. Out of curiosity I installed a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP and performance was smooth. I do currently use a USB 2 PS2 convertor on the motherboards USB1.1 ports but don't think this could cause the performance drop. Also tried Stereo or EAX from SB Live! and Aureal SQ2500 and proformace stays the same.

Is it just not enough texture memory?! I have pushed the card to 200 core/mem and still get choppy framerate. Also any recommended settings I should be choosing? Any programs that can show the framerate for nfs? Fraps 1.9D won't work.

A V3 3K should have more than enough texture memory to run this game. The minimum requirement is 2 megs with 8 megs recommended. Everything else looks to be well above the recommended minimums. Have you tried reinstalling the Voodoo drivers, doing a clean sweep of any old drivers before you reinstall? Sometimes old versions of drivers hang around and cause problems. has some fan made drivers and tweaking utilities that might help.

That may be it. There are mods to raise the resolution of the textures and the polygon count of the cars and to add more cars to the game than was originally intended. Boosting the graphical requirements of the game may necessitate the use of a more powerful graphics card. It makes sense. That may be why a V5 works fine and a V3 stutters. Lowering the graphical requirements would probably get the framerates back up otherwise the only other choice is to put a more powerful graphics card in. I don't know how determined the original poster is to continue playing this game with a Voodoo card, but V4's and V5's aren't exactly going to be cheap upgrades from a V3. A GeForce or Radeon would be more economical.

As for the game. It is the just the basic "full" install. The unofficial Stock Pack patch out there that helps XP compatibility and glide wrapper but you can unselect that stuff and just install the 3ddata update from it. There are no downloaded cars, no holy-poly fix installed.

Now I mostly have it playable with just little choppiness on some tracks still at 1024x768@16. Its been a bit of work to get there though. It will be rather smooth if I play the game from the front bumper camera view but I like the heli-cam view so it must just not be enough grunt from the card.

About the Voodoo 5. I already have a system built with a P3 1.4-s and a Voodoo 5 and its great. I just re-configured my 2nd system with a P3 1GHz, Voodoo 3 as I have taken a liking to the V3 and trying to see what it's potential can be. Back in the day I only owned a V1, voodoo banshee then voodoo 2 8mb which really limited game performance, so now that I have more voodoo cards I'm just toying around and see what they can do since I own alot of voodoo's now!

The V5 may have been temporarily borrowed from another machine so if that card is going to be returning to it's home, then an upgrade to the V3 would be needed for the machine that the game is intended to be run on.

About the texture memory available, he's using 6 Mb of VRAM for three frame buffers + z-buffer, so there are 10 Mb left for textures. That should be more than enough, if a Voodoo2 with 8 Mb of texture memory is able to run the game smoothly.

About that glide3x.dll file in the game folder, I didn't understand how it arrived there. Was it installed by the game setup, or by a patch? Unless it is a specially optimized version of glide3x.dll for Voodoo3, I would delete that file and use the default one that comes with the driver.

The glide3x.dll is put there by me. In the link I posted above it shows it is recommended to put glide2x and glide 3x in the games main folder. I had tried many in the directory seeing if one would work better than another.

As in my last posting I stated about a Best NFS which contains a voodoo2z.dll (renamed t voodoo2a.dll for NFS3/4) and glide3x.dll which someone recommends replacing for all NFS3/4/5 with these for better graphics and performance. Using these do seem to help a bit. It also had a reg file I installed as well but don't know what it particularly does.

Also for the heck of it I tossed NFS5 dx7z.dll in NFS4 as d3da.dll, performance as slightly improved again (or atleast in class B races like Celtic where polys are low). This could just be a placebo effect as I dunno why this should be working when using thrash driver "voodoo2". Would d3da.dll help with Sound or usb controller (DXsound EAX/DXinput)??

hey batracio, how do you know the vram usage? Is that estimated? I haven't dropped back to 800x600 or lower to see if it would help....but higher the resolution (such as 1024x768) usually means more vram usage doesn't?

I think you are trying too many things without actually knowing what each one does. For example, the link you posted above recommends to put glide files in the game folder, but it specifically mentions glide 2x/3x libraries from V3 install CD, not any version you can find out there. If you really want to follow this advice, don't use any files from 1.03-1.07 reference drivers or third-party drivers. Grab them from V3 install CD, or, if you don't have it, from 1.00.00 reference driver.

Still I don't understand what "NFS Best gfx" or "Best NFS" means. Is it a special game release? Is it an unofficial patch? Apparently it comes with its own glide3x.dll, but you don't know what driver version it is from? And then you install a different driver version in the system folder? Looks like a bit of a mess to me. And, by the way, you should never install a reg file if you don't know exactly what it does. It may render your system unbootable.

Ok, At that time i would use drive cleaner 2.7, fully remove all drivers, then install that driver fully and copy its glide2x/3x over to the game folder and try a few races. I did not try the cd as I don't have one, I can try 1.00 from falconfly.de though.

These are 2 unofficial game patches.

One is Fast gfx patch which basically lets you swap out NFS5 dx7z.dll to NFS4 as D3Da.dll.

Second is the best nfs which is the glide3x.dll/reg file/voodoo2z.dll. I had over checked the reg file for malicious info but all pertained to video settings it seemed. I can code it here if you'd like (if this forum supports [ code ] ).

The best nfs I think helped the most thus far.

I currently choose "voodoo2" which is glide. When I use "d3d" it looks good...but not as good as voodoo2 because in tree's look worse as well at the road looks worse as well, I didn't look for more graphic issues while using d3d though. Im not sure but atleast NFS3 also had a "voodoo" thrash driver for the Voodoo1 accelerator.

No reason why a USB to Playstation 2 controller could be causing this? Maybe a polling issue or driver? I now have tried two different adapters with different drivers with about the same results. When I use my Xbox360 wired controller on my P3-S 1.4 and Voodoo5 I would get jerky play but assume it was the drivers. Have not tried the 360 controller on this voodoo 3 built PC though.

From my recent experience forcing NFS3 & NFS4 to run in stereoscopic 3D mode, I would say that registry keys just allow the game engine to detect some 3D chipsets and configure settings accordingly. But if those registry keys don't perfectly match the entries in configuration file, game engine ignores them and runs in D3D mode. That's why I posted these instructions:

Check that your registry keys for V3 match the ones in 3ddata.dat (remember the case sensitivity), and set D3D=0 if not already set. You don't have to follow the other instructions, as they are intended to run the game in Glide 2.x instead of Glide 3.x. However, that could be an interesting try, as Glide 2.x may perform better than Glide 3.x (just another guess from me).

Pretty much any time I have run High Stakes on any grafx card with 16mb or less video ram on anything higher then 800x600 maxed out, the games framerate chokes. I really just wonder if its a video ram issue. 32 meg on up cards never gave me any problems at 1024x768.

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