Cars 2 – How to Fix the Crashes and Widescreen Bugs

Simple Guide on Fixing the Crashes and Widescreen Bugs in Cars 2

In this guide we will take a look at two of the most common issues in the Cars 2 game, and attempt to fix them.

The biggest issue is quite annoying. The game has a tendency to crash after about 30 to 60 minutes on modern multi-core computers. Reason being is the audio engine which is very badly implemented and is not limited to a single core process by the game itself.

Thankfully, Windows has ways of getting around this. I will create a simple Batch script which launches the program using the start command, followed by the /affinity argument to specify which CPU thread should handle the game.

In this example I will set it to “2”, because I am running it on a dual core, dual thread computer and I want the game to NOT use the first core as that’s in use by more programs than the last one.

The Affinity argument only accepts hexadecimal inputs. Hexadecimal is a base-16 system which goes from 1 to F. See the below table…

CPU core     BIN code    HEX code     Number

CPU0         0001        1            1
CPU1         0010        2            2
CPU2         0011        3            3
CPU3         0100        4            4
CPU4         0101        5            5
CPU5         0110        6            6
CPU6         0111        7            7
CPU7         1000        8            8

So when using the affinity argument and want to select a CPU thread you will have to use the HEX code association, and not the binary or “Number” representation. Hexadecimal only!

If we now want to start Cars 2 with this knowlegde, we have to navigate to out game install directory, which is usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Cars 2”.

When we are there, we’ll create a new file called “Cars 2.bat”. Edit the Batch file with Notepad, and paste the following into it…

@echo off
start /affinity 2 Game-Cars.exe

As previously discussed, in my example I’d using the second thread in my CPU, hence /affinity 2

Now you can run Cars 2 without the fear of it crashing everytime you want to race against friends or whatever.

Part Two

For the second part of this guide, let’s discuss the widescreen issue. On all systems with Intel Integrated Graphics, you will not be able to render the game at any resolution other than a 4×3 aspect ratio.

That means 1600×1200, 1024×768, etc, only the square-type displays. The fix for this is extraordinarily easy to perform.

First of all, open Notepad, and click on File > Open and browse to your Cars 2 install directory. Select “spec.cfg”.

Under “High” change “ShaderVersion=4” to “ShaderVersion=3”. Now you will be able to access any resolution on your laptop without issue.

Hope you have found this guide useful!