Part 1

Begin your Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012) adventure! This guide covers the introduction, PC setup tips, controls, car classes, and the basics of racing.

Alright, let's dive into Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012)! Forget the unskippable intro movie – you'll get to experience that firsthand. Think of this game like Burnout Paradise, but with a much bigger need for speed. Honestly, I haven't played a Need for Speed game since the really old days (like Windows 95!), so I'm pretty much a newbie to this series too, just like you might be. My first taste of Burnout was on the original Xbox, and I loved Burnout Paradise, so I was hyped to get back into that open-world cop-chasing fun. My final take? It's a solid game. Not mind-blowing, but definitely good for some fast-paced driving thrills.

So, buckle up, pick your favorite car class, and get ready to hit speeds over 200 MPH. If you blast past me that fast, I'd probably spill my coffee too – just like that guy in Top Gun!

PC Setup Tips

A lot of players have been saying this game isn't optimized well, with low FPS even on high-end PCs. My setup is pretty modest: an AMD APU A4-3400 2.7Ghz Dual core, Radeon HD 6410D graphics with 1GB VRAM, 8GB RAM, and a slow HDD. Even with this setup, I'm hitting around 26-34 FPS, averaging 30 FPS. If I overclock my RAM to 1866Mhz, I can keep it stable at 30 FPS. I do agree the optimization isn't great – turning off motion blur or low shadows barely makes a difference. I've got most settings on low or off, but there are a few things you can tweak.

First, let's look at your graphics card settings. I'm using AMD's Catalyst Control Center. If you have a better AMD card, your default settings might be fine, but here's what I did: I set Tesselation to 'AMD optimized' because turning it off actually lowered my minimum frames. Texture Filtering Quality is set to 'Performance'.

Inside the game, one setting really stood out: Gamma correction. When it's...