Hardware upgrade eyeing NR 2003

[Rodrigo Alencar]

Hello and good morning everyone,

I am planning to do a upgrade on my computer and would like to hear from you guys what hardware piece you think would be more impactfull on NR2003 performance. I am running today a 3.6 GHz Intel I7 with 32 GB RAM memory and as a video card a 4GB DDR5 GeForce GTX 970.
My idea is to replace either the videocard for a 8GBs one or moving up RAM to 64 GBs but not before listen here what would be general opinion on the best way to boost game performance. (maybe install a SSD sotage unit? I don´t know....)

Thanks in advance for your opinion and ideas

 

[Eric Hostetler]

Given the age of NR2003, it is not always a good thing to have the latest and greatest because it was designed to run on machines of that era...So, having the latest bells and whistles won't mean a lot of great performance gains, because NR2003 was designed to run so fast and nothing more....Now if you were moving from a Celeron or something like that you would see gains, but you already have I7 which is pretty good for NR2003... I would re think your strategy here...

 

[jrp61356]

Eric's points are well-taken. I recently upgraded my computer - an older Dell Optiplex running Win7, using on-board graphics. All I did was drop a 1GB Nvidia GeForce graphics card in, and the difference is amazing. Routinely get well over 100FPS now. So having a cutting-edge computer rig with a bunch of memory or a super-fast HD won't necessarily improve game performance. As Eric pointed out, NR2003 is old tech...

 

[Rodrigo Alencar]

I know that but is pretty disappointing not to be able to run RR tracks without experiencing a HUGE fps drop down. So I was thinking since I will have to format it's HDD why not taking advantage of the downtime and spice it up a little bit more.

 

[Rodrigo Alencar]

But thanks anyway

 

[garrett1127]

You should look at your graphics card setting in the nvidia cp, you may need to do some adjusting there. What you have now is way over kill for this game. It'll never use what you have. The RR tracks give lower fps to everyone due to it's high graphic content. You can dl RR's low res shared folder which will help your fps drop. Just keep in mind, anything above 30 fps the human eye can't see the difference.

 

[Rodrigo Alencar]

Good point. Although NR2003 is my primary racing game I also play RaceRoom and Nascar Heat (loosing hope though 704 wants to put out a really simulation content) so I am balancing needs for everything.
I am REALLY convinced in switching my video card to a Radeon one. What you think?

 

[garrett1127]

Don't have an opinion about the Radeon card, haven't used one in years, but if you read some of the hardware review sites, most card are about the same, just depending on what you need it for.

 

[The_Tigg]

Honesty, if you have anything above and including Windows XP Service Pack 3 with a 256 meg video card you can run NR2003 at max everything. For a lot of the new mods and tracks all you need is Windows XP S.
P. 3 with a one gig card. Anything about that O.S. and a decent video card shouldn't have any problems running NR2003.

 

[Rodrigo Alencar]

Right, thanks.