Here's a helpful paper related to "Need for Speed: Carbon" and potentially useful for optimizing performance or understanding the game's mechanics:
A gaming-related query!
"An Analysis of Game Engine Performance on Modern CPUs" Authors: Tommaso Zella, et al. Publication: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Computer Graphics and Vision (ICCGV), 2015
The Skidrow and Reloaded versions of Need for Speed: Carbon are likely to have similar performance characteristics, as they are built on the same game engine. However, the optimized patches and updates provided by these groups may affect performance.