Improving Image Quality

A little tweak that makes textures look better from certain angles.

Introduction

While browsing my car collection, i've noticed the textures look blurred at some angles when rotating the view. Also checked the track textures and same thing happens.

This is due the anisotropic filtering of the game isn't good how it was supposed to be.

In this guide, i will show you how to fix that in a simple way. Let's get started.

Disabling In-game Anisotropic Filtering

First of all, go to Options > Video > Advanced Settings.

Find "Anisotropic Filtering" option and deactivate it, like in the image below:




















Now close your game.

NVIDIA Control Panel

Open NVIDIA Control Panel. You can do this by right clicking on your mouse when in Desktop or search it in Windows Start Menu.

Go to "Manage 3D Settings" and click on "Program Settings" tab, select Hot Wheels Unleashed executable in the drop list and search for an option called "Anisotropic Filtering", and change it to 16x like in the following image:


























After that, hit "Apply" right bellow.

Comparisons (click to enlarge)

Hot Wheels Unleashed Anisotropic Filtering:



















NVIDIA Anisotropic Filtering:



















Track Textures:

Conclusion

Despite you don't own an NVIDIA GPU, this method can be done with any graphic card, just search the control panel for your respective manufacturer.

That's it, now enjoy Hot Wheels Unleashed! Hope this guide helped!

[MandrakeGTI]

@El Diablo glad it helped. For time trials i suggest using McLaren Senna or Koenigsegg Jesko. Power Rocket is also a good choice since it has 6 boosts.

[El Diablo]

OK ive transfer game to Disc C what is SSD(not sure are M.2)
after playing few days here results
-Game Boot up faster(That game logo with loading circle)
-Tracks loads faster
-Still got slowdowns but not very often, and sometimes they not very heavy as in HDD.

Ive think in that case are problem with my fans(They are noisy even in low temps), maybe if gonna clean up fans and apply new thermal paste or replace to new fresh fans game will work without any slow downs.

But still game are more playable ;) so Thank you.


BTW not tech question, what car you can reccomend for Time Trails?
Because i never been good at timed races, ive had full upgraded Track manga who helped me win few first time trails but for others need something better ;)

[MandrakeGTI]

@El Diablo i guess that's why your game is slowing down. Try switching to a M.2 SSD.

[El Diablo]

its on HDD

[MandrakeGTI]

@El Diablo are you running the game on a HD or SSD?

[El Diablo]

i don't understand this, I have a very good laptop and yet the game randomly slows down for no reason.
Antivirus disabled, background programs (except Steam) disabled, plenty of free disk space, Vsync disabled, shadows disabled, fps set to dynamic.

What else should I do to make the game run smoothly?

[MandrakeGTI]

@Ron at the time i made this guide, i don't remember seeing the option you talked about. It was a few days after the game's release, maybe they added it later in a update and i didn't know about that, since i stopped playing. My machine back then packed a RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB RAM with NVMe SSD and i was able to play at a stable 120 fps with everything maxed out. However, thanks for mentioning it, i'm gonna check.

[Ron]

I personally think the game looks well enough to leave it at the game setting, these kinds of settings have more impact on things you see in the distance, as this game offers a over-render option, which I have set to 150% , I have not noticed any problems at all to be honest...Maybe you machine is not good enough but you should try it, I can choose between a native 120 fps and arounf 70-80 fps when set to 150% over-render, I think for this game the lower framerate does not hinder at all, since it is not an first person shooter..

[MandrakeGTI]

@Tridenz - Yes, leave these changes. NVIDIA Control Panel automatically adjust the settings for a better result and to not make they conflict.

[Tridenz]

When I set Nvidia AF to 16x, it automatically makes the following changes:
Texture Filter - Anisotropic sample --> OFF
Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias --> Clamp.

Should I leave these automatic changes in place or put them back to their default settings?