Well I tried the fix mentioned in the post and it worked for my ATI 4870 card...but...still very poor performance and I have to keep shadows off. The game seems to regonize my card now but still runs better in software mode (with cars turned off).
I have been playing games for many years and have never run into a developer making a game in this way. Mabye it's just the way the engine runs but I have played games older and close to the age of this one and I get extreme performance due to my newer computer.
I can't imagine that Nvidia cards would work any better as it seems to just be the way the game was designed. Sure you can make it recognize your card, but like what happened with mine, depending on how fast your CPU is your likley going to be better off sticking with software for rendering. And even if hardware works out for you, if it's a newer card your going to at least have to turn off shadows to get it to a playable FPS.
I played this game originally on a Radeon 9700 Pro with a much slower CPU and I got MUCH better performance then this. I know, it's sad really, it's such a good game!
Bottem line, you can try the fix in this post, it could help depending on your situation. But the problem is deeper then just recognizing the GPU. The game itself has some sort of design flaw beyond my tech knowlage and unless you have older hardware or they decied to patch the game we are screwed.
System I tested this on:
Core 2 DUO@3.8Ghz
4Gig DDR2@1066Mhz
Radeon HD 4870 1024MB
Asus P5Q Pro
WinXP Pro 32Bit
