High CPU and GPU Usage in NFS Heat: Seeking Solutions

[FatBoiiYella]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to start a discussion about a frustrating issue I’ve been experiencing with Need for Speed: Heat after upgrading my rig. My setup includes a Ryzen 9 and an RTX 4070 Ti, which should handle this game effortlessly. However, I’m noticing extreme CPU usage (almost constantly at 100%) and high GPU temperatures (hovering around 83°C) even on low settings.

Here’s what I’ve done so far to try and fix the problem:

Nvidia Optimal Settings:
I initially went with Nvidia's "optimal" settings, which defaulted to Ultra, but this caused massive CPU strain and pushed the GPU to its limits. I found it odd that the game recommends Ultra by default, considering these performance issues.

Graphics Settings:
I’ve lowered all in-game graphics settings to the bare minimum, but the CPU usage remains high, and the GPU temps are still uncomfortably hot.

CPU Core Fix:
I applied the core tweak (the text file fix floating around online) to try and balance the workload better, but it didn’t seem to make a significant difference.

Nvidia Control Panel Adjustments:
I followed the recommended performance tweaks, like setting the Power Management Mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance" and tweaking other settings for smoother gameplay. Still no luck.

Driver Updates:
Both my GPU and chipset drivers are up to date, but the issue persists.

Frame Rate Limiting:
I capped the frame rate at 60 FPS to reduce the workload on my CPU and GPU, but while it helped slightly, the CPU usage still spikes unreasonably high.

What’s puzzling is that my rig handles far more demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy without breaking a sweat. It feels like the game’s optimization is seriously off, and I’m at a loss for what else to try.

So, I’m reaching out to see if anyone has found a reliable solution to this. Is this just an issue with the game itself, or is there something I’m missing? If you’ve managed to get NFS Heat to run smoothly on a similar setup, I’d really appreciate hearing about the steps you took.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

[Joreck]

are you playing on a laptop? what's your actual cpu model?

my desktop has a 7800X3D cpu, 7900XTX gpu and 32GB of DDR5 @6000MT/s ram.

at 4k with 100% render scale, I capped the game to 120fps which utilises gpu about 80% and cpu maybe 50-60% (tbh never paid much attention to it). shadows and post processing are set to high or medium, rest is ultra.

I never tried any fixes myself as I'm happy with performance, but as long as the game uses all your cpu cores it really shouldn't be an issue at 60fps.

Do you have any programs running in background that might leech performance?

[(MP) Bud Tendy]

Frostbite engine go Brrrrrrrrr!

[PyroMonk]

you aught to lower your fps cap until the frametime and fps stabilize. Then, sacrifice as much stability as you like for looks. But you aught to learn the base-line for each game on your system by some point after so many hours of playing.
Your usage and such should not matter until you know what settings are you using that will give you stable frame times. 144 (138with gsync) is 7.2 ms frame time. not every game is optimized but this one has a lot of video memory usage (GDDR6x is faster than gddr6 so I can stream 1440p in these older titles just fine) and the CPU usage might be that your CPU is giving unstable clocks and so your Frame times will never actually be stable - you could lock the cores that are being used for this.It gets more complicated when you start learning which core is fastest but it doesn't matter much, you can underclock and get the same results with great frame times and settings, although I know we amd cpu users have many options for overclocking, stick to what's comfortable ig.

[k]

There's no solution to this, game is very CPU and GPU heavy for no good reason and it IMO looks underwhelming (image is oversharpened, motion blur is terrible, grainy af, graphics during the day is abysmal, night looks miles better but it's more taxing)

Game is the issue, not your hardware. Unbound plays fine. Ghost botched optimization.

[Alexey the Lightspeed]

They don't call the NFS game "HEAT" for nothing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In all seriousness I experience the same problem with modern hardware.

[REE-POI?]

Originally posted by Kamil:

There's no solution to this, game is very CPU and GPU heavy for no good reason and it IMO looks underwhelming (image is oversharpened, motion blur is terrible, grainy af, graphics during the day is abysmal, night looks miles better but it's more taxing)

Game is the issue, not your hardware. Unbound plays fine. Ghost botched optimization.

That's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because I ran it on a r7 3800x and a 2060 with 32gb of ram and the game barely touched any of it, was averaging 50-60% on the cpu, 60-70% on my gpu with only about 12 gb of ram being utilised by the game and I was getting about 80fps with med-high settings pre upgrade, now I have a 9800x3d with a 2060 and the game is trying to use 100% of both, it's insane to me that I could download the game 20 times on the old pc and not have any issues, but the instant I do it on a fresh build there's 0 solutions for it, not saying the game isn't optimised it clearly isn't, but it being heavy on the components that's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[FatBoiiYella]

Originally posted by Joreck:

are you playing on a laptop? what's your actual cpu model?

my desktop has a 7800X3D cpu, 7900XTX gpu and 32GB of DDR5 @6000MT/s ram.

at 4k with 100% render scale, I capped the game to 120fps which utilises gpu about 80% and cpu maybe 50-60% (tbh never paid much attention to it). shadows and post processing are set to high or medium, rest is ultra.

I never tried any fixes myself as I'm happy with performance, but as long as the game uses all your cpu cores it really shouldn't be an issue at 60fps.

Do you have any programs running in background that might leech performance?

Ryzen 7 5800c3d paired with a 4070ti super

[kosKya]

This game can only be fixed like this https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Need_for_Speed_Heat#High_CPU_usage but I wouldn't buy a game with Denuvo, the game is 6 years old, they left it as additional garbage game