What you should do to ensure the game plays as intended.

[ToniStarks]

These are some observations and adjustments I've made in regards to this years game, and I'd like to share them in hopes of improving others experiences with the game.

First and foremost, the rosters NEED to be adjusted for the game to even resemble anything remotely close to lifelike basketball. I'm not going to elaborate here as I feel these adjustments are all subjective, but something has to be done in this regard, no doubt about it.

The next thing I would like to comment on has to do with the games framerate. I wasn't fully aware that framerate had such an impact on how the game played out. Not until I went through a few tests using the Fraps framerate monitor. Once you get your framerate up to par, the game play is nothing short of spectacular. So, after several tests, I came to the deduction that your framerate should stay at or above 30fps at ALL times, especially when the screen is displaying the maximum amout of polygons at a time.

Now, although Fraps is a nice program for framerate analysis, I would STRONGLY suggest that you disable this program once you've gotten a glimpse of your framerate. Why you ask? After I disabled fraps on MY system, it seemed like my framerates skyrocketed an additional 5-10 fps, which is a drastic or dramatic difference in this game IMO, especially if your fps is on the low side to begin with. I can only attribute this disparity in performance to the additional overhead provided by the program. Anyhow, from that point onwards I was now able to set floor reflection to medium, player detail medium, high texture, shadows off, bench off, lighting off(This is huge, and personally I love the game without lighting, players look more life-like and authentic, try it)the rest on low, anistropic on, triple buffer off, vsync off with refresh forced to 75hz via the new Nvidia driver control panel(This gives you a more reasonable refresh rate with less onscreen tearing effects due to vsync), with no hiccup and CONSTANT framerates at 1280X1024

My system

PIII 500
Gforce 4 Ti200
256 SDRAM
Under the Nvidia control panel ( Anistropic settings set to 0, texture 20, image detail high, antialiasing 2, texture sharpening off)

Previously, before gauging the fps, the game would act very abnormal. There would be constant and sudden bursts or changes in framerate during the cours of a game. This seriously hampered gameplay as you can imagine. I suspect the game did this in attempt to compensate for lack of a solid fps. Ideally, while using fraps you want to see anywhere from 30-55fps onscreen if at all possible.


Well, what can I say. After roster alterations and framerate adjustements, this game is simply mind blowing. I have the Xbox version of the game(which tied me down till the Pc's release)and I can tell you unequivocally, that the Pc version is hands down the superior of the two in just about every facet of the game. The only area where I feel the xbox outshines its Pc counterpart is in the color richness of the jerseys and environment(The Pc always seems to fall victim to this every year), however I'm sure the patching commnunity can address this problem in due time.

I hope this information can and will be put to good use, especially for those with a similar system setup.

Let me know if anyone has additional questions.

[raff]

Are you serious about the PC version being better than the Xbox? Even when your playing with not all the settings set to Max\high?