NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

There is a video walking you through installing NR2003 to your computer linked down below. The links we're including simply provide you with the base game content needed. You will not be torrenting any process of installing this game.

First thing you’ll see upon opening the game is the graphics configuration. Choose your monitor’s resolution in 32 bit. It is not recommended to run in windowed mode, but it does work fine if run in a window. You’ll just have the window border at the top of the screen.

Once in the game, click on ‘Player Info’. Click on ‘New’ and enter whatever you want for first and last name. When finished, click done at the bottom right. It will likely ask you at this point to calibrate your wheel/controller.

Once calibrated, go ahead and run a few test laps around any track to make sure the game is running as it should. Graphics will likely be blurry. That will be fixed in the following steps.

Use the executable we linked above to patch your nr2003.exe file and it will update the game to be able to utilize 4GB of virtual memory instead of the 2GB originally available due to being a 32 bit program.

After you’ve applied this patch, you will have a new NR2003.exe and the one prior to the patch will be renamed ‘nr2003.exe.backup.

The DX9 file will be used to bring NR2003 into using DirectX9 as opposed to DirectX8. DX9 is far more efficient. This file needs to be placed in your default NR2003 folder. The default folder would be C:\Papyrus\NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

Once you've installed the base game, you'll want to update the shared folder located inside of your tracks folder. Most mod tracks published after 2012 use this folder. You'll be extracting the update to Papyrus/NASCAR Racing 2003 Season/tracks.

As a bonus, there's a small extra that you can download that would update more of the shared folder that isn't as universally required.

Some changes need to be made to a few text based files in order to get the most out of the graphics within the game.

1.) First open the core.ini file. This is located in your core NR2003 folder (default is c:\papyrus\nascar racing 2003 season)

Change the numbers on the line for [FileLRUCache] from 4194304 to 14194304. (You’re just adding a 1 to the front of it).

Next locate the [Memory] section and change the ‘MaxBlockSize’ number to 524288.

Save and close the core.ini file.

2.) Next open your Rend_dxg.ini for nVidia users or the rend_ogl.ini for OpenGL users.

Change the ‘AnisotropicLevel’ to 0.

Next, change the ‘TextureSetSize’ to -1.

Save and close the file.

3.) Next open your player.ini file, typically located in c:\Papyrus\NASCAR Racing 2003 Season\Players\”Your Player Named Folder”

In [Graphics Options] change:
draw_ahead_distance to 100
draw_behind_distance to 100 (optional if you have a powerful computer)
texture_quality to 100

Under [Opponent Manager] change:
import_textures_with_compression to 0 (optional for more powerful computers)

Save file and close it.

Special note: Any time your graphics drivers alter, most notably when the drivers update, the next time you open NR2003 the graphics setup will rerun. When it does, you’ll need to repeat the 2nd step that’s above written in Red. That’s the only thing that changes when the graphics configuration runs. The rest all remains the same as you had changed it originally.

These settings are specifically for nVidia cards, though the AMD side has essentially (mostly) the same options. If you’re unsure on the AMD side of a specific setting, just leave it and don’t change it. Only change the ones that are obvious. For nVidia users, you may follow right along. These settings are from ‘TheBenCrazy’ video and are excellent settings.

1.) Right click on your desktop and click the nVidia Control Panel.
2.) Click ‘Manage 3D Settings’.
3.) Click the ‘Program Settings’ tab at the top of the ‘Manage 3D Settings’.
4.) Select your NR2003 executable by clicking ‘Add’ and locating the executable. This will allow the control panel to only apply these settings specifically to this game.

Here are the recommended settings:

Image Sharpening – Use global setting (Off)
Ambient Occlusion – Not supported for this application
Anisotropic Filtering – 16x
Antialiasing – FXAA – On
Antialiasing – Gamma Correction – Off
Antialiasing – Mode – Override any application settings
Antialiasing – Setting – 8x
CUDA – GPUs – Use global settings (All)
Low Latency Mode – Use global setting (Off)
Monitor Technology – Use global settings (G-SYNC Compatible)
Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) – On
OpenGL Rendering GPU – Use global setting (Auto-select)
Power management mode – Optimal Power
Preferred refresh rate – Use global setting (Highest available)
Texture filtering – Anisotropic…. – Off
Texture filtering – Negative LOD bias – Clamp
Texture filtering – Quality – High quality
Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization – Off
Threaded optimization – Auto
Triple buffering – Off
Vertical sync – Off
Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames – n/a
Virtual Reality – Variable Rate… – Not supported (n/a)