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.



Surprisingly the Intel Core i5 IGP (with slightly faster CPU core speed) beats the Radeon HD 5450 512MB here by just a couple of FPS in minimum and average frame rates, however, the Intel system like the AMD 785G system does no render the grass or additional water effects. The Radeon HD 5450, just like the Nvidia GeForce 9400 IGP, does render these extra bits though meaning it has more polygons and effects to handle, creating more demands on the GPU, lowering its frame rate. It's outside of the settings we can adjust unfortunately, but it's good to have a little extra eye-candy in addition to very smooth frame rates.