Trackmania in the technology test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: With Trackmania, Ubisoft is sending a remake of Trackmania Nations into the race. The game is prettier than its predecessor, but it also requires a significantly faster graphics card. ComputerBase has several graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia in the benchmark.

Trackmania Nations was released in 2006 and the racing game has become very popular. That was all the more true for the Trackmania Nations Forever, which was released in 2008 and which was also received absolutely positively as a free-of-charge Free-2-Play offshoot with numerous, sometimes completely crazy tracks built by players. The successors of Nations, on the other hand, had a difficult time with the fans. And that’s exactly what the developer Nadeo wants to change with the latest part. This is simply called Trackmania and it is a remake – not a remaster – of Trackmania Nations.

Average graphic is good enough

There is not much technical information about Trackmania. The racing game uses the DirectX 11 API on the PC and an in-house engine will probably be used as usual. Overall, the game looks “okay”, but nothing more. The graphic should not be looked at in too much detail, but that is not a problem. Because if you don’t have one thing in Trackmania, it’s time to take a look. The sometimes below average graphics quality is therefore forgiven. In connection with the game concept of Trackmania, however, the optics fit.

The graphics menu of the PC version of Trackmania is cumbersome. Because the graphic presets automatically block several individual options. That might sound sensible at first glance, but it is rather annoying when it is not exactly the preset, but the options are to be set separately. The game must be restarted to change some options.

The menu itself is kept simple. There are no descriptions of the options, including sample screenshots. There is not much comfort, but then a little. Trackmania offers a freely configurable FPS limiter. There is also the option of entering a freely configurable minimum FPS value. If this is not reached, Trackmania reduces the resolution in order to bring the frame rate back to at least this value.

Four graphic presets and simple anti-aliasing

Trackmania offers four different graphic presets, which are called “Very Fast”, “Fast”, “Nice” and “Very Nice”, suitable for a racing game. After changing, the game must be restarted. A short comparison has shown that the performance can be increased significantly by using the presets at the expense of the image quality.

The arcade racing game offers the post-processing variants FXAA and TAA as anti-aliasing. As usual, TAA smooths the picture better, but in low resolutions such as Full HD it creates a blur over the picture. Nevertheless, TAA is preferable, although the smoothing is then at most average. A high level of image stability is only possible through the combination of TAA with high resolutions of at least WQHD, or better still Ultra HD.

In addition, the picture supports MSAA, which only works if the graphics preset is set to Fast or Very Fast – the PP variants then no longer work as a quasi-compensation. But even MSAA smooths the picture at most on average. There is no good anti-aliasing in Trackmania. Just like in-game up- and down-sampling.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks and frame times