Can the particles be disabled?

Every single NFS game I have has a wide set of graphics options that I can temper to make the game run smoothly. Well, all except this one. All I have to choose from are shadow levels and resolution, so obviously I'm SOL.

But, does anyone know of any way to disable the particle system? That causes a lot of unnecessary lag, especially in crashes. If anyone has suggestions THAT MODIFY THE GAME, please tell me. I end any unnecessary tasks before playing which really doesn't do much for lag, and I also set my power settings to High Performance (it's a laptop) but that's as much as I know.

Here's what I can tell you as far as performance:

Laptop
Manufactured in June 2011 (Windows 7)
Processor speed: 2.1GHz
RAM: 4 GB (2.6 GB available to use)
Hard Drive: 300 GB (two partitions of 260GB and 40GB, 30 GB total free)
Page file: total of 20GB (probably really excessive)

Desktop
Rebuilt, 2007 (Windows XP)
Processor speed: 2.8 GHz
RAM: 2 GB (unknown how much is available)
Hard drive: 40 GB (10 GB free)
Page file: About 5 GB

Safe to say, the laptop runs far faster... I made a recording of End Of The Line on the laptop, but I wouldn't even be able to get the game to run on the desktop. RAM is not an option, and changing any hardware on the laptop is not an option.

Buy a new and/or refurbish laptop/PC that has a dedicated graphics card. That's all there is to it! Otherwise don't expect to play much of anything since most games require a dual core or higher w/a dedicated GPU

DogManDan wrote:Buy a new and/or refurbish laptop/PC that has a dedicated graphics card. That's all there is to it! Otherwise don't expect to play much of anything since most games require a dual core or higher w/a dedicated GPU

This is a quad core laptop and it runs all the games up to Undercover just fine. Underground 2 and the original MW are the last ones that run smoothly with maximum graphics settings. Carbon is just a bit laggy with maxed settings, but nowhere near as bad as HP. I've got a part time job which nets me $300 a month after gas and insurance. This laptop is a school owned one, and they're not letting us buy them at the end of the year (in previous years, seniors were allowed to purchase their laptops at the end of the year).

Unfortunately, this laptop is odd in the fact that it seems to only use one core and fully use it at that, while all the other cores are essentially not seen by the game. If I knew how to get multiple cores dedicated to the game, that would likely solve most of my lag problem. It's not even using 50% of the available RAM, so I'm pretty well wasting all that pagefile except for the few times that I have a massive number of tabs open in Chrome (browsing a forum typically, I usually open lots of threads in advance)

seems unusual. Maybe they have some administrator functions set on it to not allow more processing cores to be available. There are ways to tell the system which cores and how many to be dedicated. Of course the game needs to be designed to run multi-core which could be an issue as well. That sucks you can't buy the Lpatop at the end of the year.

I just discovered that it's actually a dual core but it has 4 "threads" (not sure what that means).

Here's what Speccy gave me on the CPU (made by the same people as CCleaner)



Note that I had a game running, the computer normally idles at about 100 F and it heats up to 140 F while playing NFSHP.

that is not a gaming computer at all. Sorry.

online pc gaming is like any other hobby.It takes alot of time and money to enjoy yourself.I build my desktop for around $800.the GPU was at the time almost $250.it is very hard to be a "budget gamer".I have tried.either I was stuck playing 10+ yr old games or just simple flash games.I can sympathize with you but yea I feel if you truelly want to enjoy your hobby than you might have to invest in a gaming pc.

I figure it's not. This laptop costs $600 but I'm supposedly getting a crappy refurbished one from my uncle after graduation, meaning I've got 3 months free before I have to start shoveling money into my college education ($9000 total, minimum)