Trackmania United Forever: Star Edition

Despite being Nvidia endorsed, we used Trackmania because it's a fun, casual game that's easy to drop in and out of. It works well and looks great, even on integrated graphics and has the benefit of not being another FPS! We know plenty of people who love to give Trackmania a whirl during their lunch break or play on a laptop during travels. In addition, on a HDTV the fast pace and unique tracks make for great experience, even if it's a little mind churning.

We set Trackmania Unlimited to its 'Nicer' setting on the graphics side, with V-Sync disabled and the resolution was set to 1,280 x 800. As you'll see in the screenshots below, the Nvidia graphics have additional grass and water texture effects because it's unlocked by the game automatically. We manually ran the first race in the Staged, White arena for 90 seconds, constantly throwing the car into the water and off the track in inventive ways, three times over with FRAPS 3.03 and took an average result.



We don't believe the performance here is comparative but we reported it anyway. Due to the requirement for an updated driver for the AMD SB850 Southbridge, we have to use the latest 10.4 WHQL, versus the older 9.12 we used previously to test 785G. It's clear that in the time between the two driver releases the quality of rendering has been dropped in favour of performance - particularly in the grass and most notably water effects:


As you can see, despite setting the exact same game settings in the TrackMania software, the water rendering is entirely different. On the 880G and 10.4 it's a flat blue surface with no depth and a simple reflection above, unlike the 785G with 9.12 which actually looks like water with more complex shader effects.