Trackmania United Forever: Star Edition

Despite its 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 also, it's not 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.



As an Nvidia sponsored title it's surprising to see the Intel graphics do so much better here. However, it's also worth pointing out that the game unlocks extra graphical features when the Nvidia GPU is detected - with the addition of grass and better water textures. Intel gains its much higher performance by cutting back on some of the graphical details: the water looks flat, reducing the amount of triangles that need to be rendered.

In all cases the game was very playable, though - yes it felt faster on the Intel machine, but it looked better on both the Nvidia system, and even the AMD system, since it seemed to render the water with slightly more depth.