Need for Speed Heat Lag Fix: Stuttering, FPS Drops & Crashing

Need for Speed Heat Lag Fix – Yet another Need for Speed game is making its arrival, NFS Heat will be the 24th installment in the Need for Speed series. The title has been developed by Ghost Games and published by Electronic Arts. The game is all set to release on all platforms; Windows, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. NFS Heat will be available for EA Origin Premier users from November 5, 2019, and the full release will be on November 8, 2019.

In this article, we will find out how to fix lagging issues in Need for Speed Heat. The game has been developed and published by big players but almost every AAA game nowadays has issues, probably due to the huge variety of hardware. It’s not possible for developers to test games on a large scale that is why private beta releases are made. However, I’ve not heard of one for this game yet.

I’ve written the best possible fixes and optimizations that you can apply to make your gaming experience better. If for some reason nothing works out for you, I’d recommend you comment on the article with your specs and also wait for the developers to push hotfix update.

Need for Speed Heat Lag Fix

Minimum System Requirements

• OS: Windows 10
• Processor (AMD): FX-6350 or equivalent
• Processor (Intel): Core i5-3570 or equivalent
• Memory: 8 GB
• Graphics Card (AMD): Radeon 7970/Radeon R9 280x or equivalent
• Graphics Card (Nvidia): GeForce GTX 760 or equivalent
• Hard Drive Space: 50 GB

Recommended System Requirements

• OS: Windows 10
• Processor (AMD): Ryzen 3 1300X or equivalent
• Processor (Intel): Core i7-4790 or equivalent
• Memory: 16 GB
• Graphics Card (AMD): Radeon RX 480 or equivalent
• Graphics Card (Nvidia): GeForce GTX 1060 or equivalent
• Hard Drive Space: 50 GB

Looking at the system requirements above, the game doesn’t look really demanding. The minimum is GTX 760 with FX 6350 and recommended is RX 480 with i7 4790, these are at least 3-4 years old and most of the gaming PCs have better hardware.

Your PC configuration should fall in between or higher than the recommended settings to run the game smoothly. If that is not the case, you might have to compromise with graphics and FPS obviously.

Continue reading and let’s tweak to make the game run better.

Change Graphic Card Settings

Below are the settings for AMD and Nvidia graphics card users, apply these settings for the best performance.

For Nvidia Users

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “Need for Speed: Heat”, you can manually add the game if it’s not in the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

These settings should be good enough for you. Try tweaking a bit with the priority of the application, this also tends to give a little FPS boost.

Update Device Drivers

Whenever a new game makes it’s arrival, especially when it’s a AAA title, Nvidia is known for pushing their optimized updates for the best performance with their graphic cards. I am not sure about AMD because I’ve never used an AMD card. Below are the links for downloading the latest drivers.

• Nvidia Drivers Download
• AMD Drivers Download
• Updated DirectX Drivers

NFS Heat 2019 Stuttering Fix

Another thing to check is, open up the task manager and check your memory and disk usage. Close all applications (non-windows) that are eating your memory and using disk drive. If you are still stuttering with everything looking fine then you should probably wait for the hotfix update, which should be pushed out shortly.

These problems are mostly caused due to high disk usage and can be fixed immediately by moving the game to SSD or closing apps that are using “disk”.

Disable Full-Screen Optimization & High DPI in Windows 10

Full-screen optimization and DPI settings come pre-configured with Windows 10. These are known for causing trouble with games leading to several issues. To disable:

• Locate the game installation
• Find the .exe file of the game
• Right-click > Properties > Compatibility Tab
• Tick the “Disable Full-Screen Optimizations” tab
• Now, click the “Change high DPI settings” button
• Tick “Override high DPI scaling behavior” and select “Application” from the drop-down menu
• Save Settings.

Tone Down Game Settings

The general rule of thumb for every game is if you are lagging it is always recommended to tone down the settings. Play around a little bit with the settings, turn down shadows and textures, this should help.

I will be posting my exact settings once the game is unlocked on November 5, 2019.

Turn off Game Mode

Windows says that the Game mode helps in optimizing all-around windows processes, windows updates and other windows related stuff while running games if you have the game mode enabled. But this isn’t factually true, the game bar has been known for causing issues related to FPS. So it’s better to turn it off if you are not using it.

• Click Start > Settings > Gaming
• On the Game Bar, set “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” to off.
• Now head to the Captures tab set the “Record the background while I’m playing a game” to Off.
• Lastly, click on the Game Mode tab, and turn it off.

P.S. Nvidia’s Shadowplay is better for capturing game clips.

Update Windows

The recent couple updates were weird and broke a lot of games, to fix those issues, Windows has already pushed out hotfixes and you can download them right away. If you are running an older version of Windows, I’d recommend you to download the updated version.

There was also an update that caused windows to use up a lot of RAM for its search bar’s function called Cortana. This also has been fixed, you just have to update.

Disable Discord in-game overlay

If you are using Discord like me, then I’d recommend you to change a few things. One such thing is, discord overlay, it’s not really something you need at all times. I use a two-monitor setup, so the overlay is useless for me. It is known for causing FPS related issues.

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Discord

• Open Discord
• Click on User Settings > Appearance
• Click on the Hardware Acceleration radio, this will turn it off.

Disable Discord in-game Overlay

• Open Discord
• Go to Overlay under App Settings
• Click on the “Enable in-game overlay”, this will turn it off.

Increase Game Priority

This is an old-school method of boosting FPS in certain games, this only affects the CPU relying Games.

• Press CTLR + Shift + ESC to open task manager
• Find NFS:Heat and right-click > go to details
• Now right-click on the process’s .exe file and set priority to “high”.

This will prioritize your game over other windows applications and provide you with a little boost.

Need for Speed Heat Crashing Issue Fix

EA Servers are Overloaded

The game just released and so many people are trying to access it at the same time. This is also leading to long loading times and black screens as reported in another article. I had to restart my game a couple of times to get rid of this issue. This should be fixed within a few hours if EA takes action.

Disable Overclocking

For me the culprit was my overclocked GPU, I went ahead and disabled MSI Afterburner, changed all the settings to stock and my game went running smoothly.

After doing this, I was able to play one single game online. After that my screen went black again.

The game is also lagging a lot on RTX 2060, I was only getting 50 FPS with Ultra settings. The game system requirements have GeForce GTX 1060 as recommended but still, there are multiple issues. Also, the game currently looks blurry with jagged edges all around.

If you are still lagging then I’ll advise you to check Task Manager for any applications that might be conflicting with the game. You can also turn off your antivirus while playing the game. There can be multiple reasons why the game might be lagging for you, after applying all the optimizations given above, the performance should be better.

The gameplay trailer that was released on August 20, 2019, didn’t excite me much, it’s a Need for Speed game. You have to race and do other stuff, let’s hope for the best for the release.