I didn't think it could get worse than Prostreet...
The frame rates are laughable and the draw distance is atrocious. There are times in the game when there is nothing in front of your car, and then some lag and a millisecond later, all the scenery and road finally appears. Other times, there is so much lagging that it turns into a slideshow. Of course, it turns into a slideshow right before the police roadblock shows up with a spike strip. This never happened before. Never have any games in the series had such problems. Not even the first NFS game that came out (no, not Underground, the real one) had such issues.
The physics are broken. The straw that broke the camel's back was a few minutes ago when a cop car flew over my car about 75 feet into the air and disappeared. The cars all handle the same. Same being defined as either front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or all wheel drive. The cars all feel the same as the others of the same drivetrain. To say drifting and powersliding are difficult in this game would be a huge understatement. The cars are glued to road. If you like to take sharp turns at 160 mph, this is the game for you. The sense of speed needs to be turned up. I've had to check the speedometer several times while at 180 mph because I thought I was going 60 mph or so.
About halfway through the game, the rubber band effect rears its ugly head. Wow, is it ugly, it's a lot uglier than I remember it. Take any car available to you at that time, place all the available performance parts on it, tune the car, and take down as many opponents during the race as you can and you still cannot win the race.
I turned up the graphics. I thought I smelled my computer start burning, but I took the time to admire the excellent car models, and how good the environment looked. Visuals are the only thing this game has going for it, but the lack of optimization on EA's part prevents today's midrange computers from playing even with everything on medium. You want to play everything maxed out with the highest resolution? Yeah, good luck. You will need the fastest dual core processor on the market along with three graphics cards. As for me, I kept it on mostly low setting at the 1280 x 1024 resolution. Even at such pitiful settings, the game still had all these issues. Bravo EA, keep this up, and you'll be out of business in no time and begging for a bail out.