Ronin: what kind of trouble do you have with PU on XP? I guess that I am lucky myself that I don't seem to have any issues with it so far, only thing I have seen posted by others is that they've been getting texture errors (looking low-res and ugly, especially in dash view), but I don't think it's been determined exactly what the cause is, be it XP, or modern video acceleratotrs, or simply the current version of Direct X. So I'm afraid there aren't any good tips I can give you on PU.
On the subject of the Carbon Demo, I found it severely underwhelming. I started playing it yesterday evening at 19:30 and stopped at around 20:00 with the idea that I had seen everything it had to offer. Maybe I've been spoiled by last year's MW demo, that I kept playing for
days, this demo just didn't offer any of the things in Carbon that I was looking for such as pursuit mode, online play (with be the cop mode) or the photomode - the only thing that saved it somewhat IMO was the inclusion of the '67 Camaro.
Aside from the game modes, I was not at all impressed with the graphics either, and I'm surprised why many people on other forums are wooing its looks. Details on the cars and environment don't look more impressive to me than they did in MW, and there was nothing about the Circuit tracks scenery or atmosphere that made it stand out. Plus, I'm just not a fan of night racing, I've done enough of that in both Underground games.
Then there's the fact that it just won't run at a decent framerate for me, which in combination with the fact that my graphics don't look nearly as nice as those posted by Revolution leads me to believe that perhaps this demo has some issues with 6600 cards or something, although I should look more into this before stating this as a fact.
I've seen on NFScars that Revolution runs on better hardware than me, but with settings on medium/high, my Athlon64 3200 with 1 gig ram and a 256 pci-e 6600gt card is barely able to keep the fps above 20 (res 1024, 2x AA), even in the Autosculpt menus.
Lowering graphic options barely seems to have any effect.
Minor disappointment is that it won't remember my control settings, yet it remembers my graphic prefs.
Oh, and it's already crashed a few times.
On the positive side, lowering the hood edge on the Camaro to make it look more menacing was cool, hopefully all the muscle car mod options will be fitting like this, the canyon duel was pretty exciting to do (If a bit easy) and I didn't mind the drift physics that much - I was put off at first, but just like in the UG games, it can be fun once you get the feel for it.
Maybe I've just been lucky in the past with demos, and was this year my turn to have the unlucky hardware combination that keeps NFS from running smoothly. In the end, I had my doubts about this game for a while, and this demo far from convinced me of the opposite.
Harsh as it may sound, I haven't been this unimpressed with an NFS demo since Hot Pursuit 2. :dunno: