Trackmania Turbo brings back the good old days of speedy, high action, arcade racing to consoles and gaming PCs. The player will be able to race through difficult, twisty, curvy tracks and perform over the top and insane stunts. In many ways, it’s similar to Ubisoft’s Trials series, a game in which the player needs to perform breathtaking stunts but differentiates itself due to its complex use of physics and player timing. Regardless, how does the game perform? Is it able to deliver a consistent 60 frames per second experience on all platforms? Let us find out.
Before jump into analyzing the details, we wanted to talk a bit about the file size. Compared to other racing games, Trackmania Turbo is an incredibly well compressed game. All the versions are below 5GB and it’s surprising to see so much content packed in such a small size. Granted the game isn’t a visually stunning one like Project CARS or DriveClub but in no way does it look bad. Now only if other studios could take heed.
As usual, let us take a look at the PC version first. As expected Trackmania Turbo will not really push any modern gaming PCs to their absolute limits. Heck, even if you have a gaming PC hardware that is a couple of years old, you won’t face any issues running the game at 60 frames per second. We tested the game on an AMD FX 8350 CPU and Radeon R9 290 4GB GPU along with 16 GB of memory and as mentioned above, we faced no performance issues. However screen tearing was witnessed at times. This issue is also present on the console versions and we are not sure what the reason could be. It’s even more baffling on the PC build since this isn’t a technically demanding game. Fortunately, this isn’t a deal breaker as the engine corrects the screen tearing in a few moments. The PC version does not come along with a load of graphical settings. You can change the filtering quality, the amount of frames that can be processed at a time, shader quality, reflections and shadow quality. The game also provides three presets with Very Fast representing the lowest setting and Very Nice representing the highest graphical setting (dumb names to be honest). In the end if you have a decent gaming rig which isn’t over three years old, you would be easily able to max out the game.
This brings us to the console platforms. As we have previously revealed, the beta versions of the PS4 and Xbox One builds were running at 1080p and 900p respectively. The final build also renders the game at the same resolution on both consoles. This immediately gives the PS4 the advantage of better image quality. Both versions use post processing anti-aliasing solution (which closely resembles FXAA) but due to the lower operating resolution of the Xbox One build, jaggies are more relevant. Performance wise, both versions employ a 60 frames per second cap. The good news is that both versions run at that standard with minimum hiccups in between. Frames are dropped, yes, but we are most looking at a smooth performance for both versions.
Other than the resolution parameter, both versions’ core assets are like to like. Draw distance, texture quality, shadow quality and water effects are all similar across both versions. Both versions also employ the standard depth of field and motion blur, the latter is specially implemented quite well given that the game is extremely fast paced. The physics could be laughable at times…high speed crashes against track rails results in unrealistic reactions. The cars sometimes feel like the popular Hot Wheels in video games, with no realistic adherence to the laws of physics. But this is what makes Trackmania Turbo a unique game and part of the reason why it could be a lot of fun.
In the end, the PC version is clearly the winner here due to the fact that this is not a demanding game and most rigs will be able to play at its optimum performance. Furthermore, the PC version has better anisotropic filtering along with slightly better shadow and core assets quality. Between the PS4 and Xbox One versions, it’s the PS4 version that has a better image quality but really that is the only difference between the two. Opt for the PS4 version if you can but note that the Xbox One version isn’t necessarily an inferior one.
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