PC Games- Test Drive Unlimited, Rise Of The Console Ports.

Hello gentle reader, I’ve just been racing around a lovely Hawaii island in a Lamborghini! Test Drive Unlimited features amazing terrain which encompasses an entire island in Hawaii, complete with buildings, gorgeous foliage and breathtaking views of the ocean. You have an incredible assortment of luxury automobiles ranging from Ferraris to high end Concept Vehicles which have to be unlocked. Volkswagen, Lamborghini, Mercedes Benz, Ferrari,Ascari, Aston Martin, they are all here. Perhaps one manufacturer notably absent is BMW. A limited selection of the best motorcycle brands such as Triumph and Ducatti are also added for a bit of risky fun on the roads. The game supports several different types of events including the standard Race mode. There are Fastest Time races, Speed Trap, Package Delivery, Male Model Delivery, and Female Model Delivery, and Sports Car Delivery. Some of these missions have damage meters which decrease each time you run off the road or hit oncoming traffic.

The traffic in this game is horrendous, and greatly removes the fun of speeding through Hawaii in your sports car. So, good ole PC, we have a quick and easy hack to get rid of the traffic. Doing that makes the game ever so much more fun, but plays havoc with Multiplayer. Atari and Eden should have known better and allowed people to scale down or remove the traffic in SinglePlayer mode on the PC. The traffic of Need For Speed Carbon is acceptable, driving through rush hour style Hawaii traffic where the game seems to intentionally place more cars on the road the faster you go is just stupid.

The game is beautiful, and there isn’t much if any difference between the PC Version and the Xbox360 Version.Cars are meticulously detailed inside and out, with the actual dashboards of all the vehicles included in the game. It’s gorgeous to park your Murcielago infront a thundering waterfall with sunlight glancing off the water for a photo shoot.

But If and Only If you have the very top of the line Nvidia Card to run it. You see, the developers appear to have done no optimisation at all for bringing this title to the PC. You are unable to perform what PC owners expect to be standard options such as turning off shadows. You have some basic options such as reducing screen resolution, and turning detail from low to high. The Detail settings only seem to affect view distance and the amount of foliage which in itself doesn’t affect the framerate significantly.

The other part of this performance problem is that, yes you guessed it, the game sees very little benefit to running in SLI mode. So again, those of you gamers that sprang for an expensive SLI setup will have to more or less rely on just one card to run this game. (There is a ‘hack’ to get around the SLI problem which involves renaming your testdriveunlimited EXE to gothic2.exe). On a 7800GT the game chugs along at about 25 to 30 fps at 1280×1024. To hit low 40s you need to drop your resolution down to 800 x 600. And if you are hoping to run the game with High Dynamic Range lighting enabled then your framerate will drop into the unplayable teens at 1280 x 1024.
While I think it is a good thing that developers are finding it relatively easy to make the jump from the Xbox360 to the PC. However for them to do so with no additional development or optimisations to their game engine suggests that a game released on the Xbox360 and then for the PC by the same developer will need a Geforce 8800GTX or a ATI R600 to run it the way it was intended. And if you don’t have such cards, you are going to be chugging at low framerates regardless of what settings you elect to use.

The issue of performance in TestDrive Unlimited isn’t just eye candy either, it certainly affects gameplay. The roads are far brighter and more clearly defined with HDR turned on, so while racing you have an edge if you are able to run in HDR. In areas of the track which are covered in the shadows from surrounding trees, the edges of the road tend to disappear without HDR and your ability to judge a turn is diminished. Lighting becomes even worse when the sky is overcast to the point where in some cutscenes you can barely see your driver seated in the vehicle.

Microsoft hopes to bundle all us gamers along to the magnificently flawed world of Vista Ultimate for gaming, hoping we will ignore all the software compatibility problems and the utter lack of good Video and Sound drivers from the most popular and largest gaming peripheral manufacturers such as Nvidia and Creative. However the fact is that most gamers have gotten the message and are sitting firmly on the side of good ole DirectX 9c and Windows XP. DX10 games have not yet been released, but Microsoft claims that its DirectX10 implementation will enable DX10 enabled cards to perform amazing feats of speed on Vista. I would love to see the performance numbers between Crysis running on XP and on Vista. My money is on faster game performance in XP even with DX10’s much vaunted ‘direct to hardware’ and all the other whizzbang features that have been thrown about, but which no one has actually benchmarked.

I don’t know where all this will end up, after five months some people still have hope that there isn’t something terribly broken with Vista and that Nvidia, Creative and others will magically pull 110% functional drivers out of a hat, but I’m skeptical. And after seeing the Next Gen gaming titles such as Flight Simulator X, Supreme Commander and Test Drive Unlimited stutter under anything but the most expensive (US$600.00) hardware I don’t think things look too good for the All-Inclusive realm of PC Gaming.

And for those naysayers who claim that Developers must push the envelope know that I totally agree, they have to and they should. But good developers, and the Best Developers are able to support the performance levels of a wide range of hardware in their game engines.It’s an art, and it takes good knowledge and execution to get it right. It also takes more work, it takes more time. It’s much easier to drop a game with one rendering path rather than spend a month tweaking shaders and creating alternates for mid-range video cards (7900GS and 7900GTX recently became Mid-Range apparently)to enable >30fps.

Developers should realise, though, the benefits to them and to the industry when a broader range of machines are able to run a particular game. Publishers should push for this approach as well as it certainly improves their revenue. Sure PC Gaming is always going to be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be reserved for the Elite due to Publishers and Developers trying to save time and cost.

Save Time and Cost in development at the expense of Sales? It doesn’t quite make much sense.

I would recommend TestDrive Unlimited for PC only if you are content playing the game Single Player (Multiplayer is broken with numerous server disconnects, servers going down etc.), and have a high end video card such as an ATI Radeon 1900+ or an Nvidia 7900GTX+ . If you are content to play this Single Player and can crank that HDR lighting on, AND install the No Traffic Hack (trust me, this has brought wide grins to many, many TDU PC players) then TestDrive Unlimited will be an exciting and engaging trip through Hawaii!

Update: Posts on the Test Drive Unlimited Forum indicate that there are performance problems with ALL Nvidia cards. This is apparently due to how TDU’s graphics engine works. Apparently it uses certain methods which Nvidia’s cards aren’t well equipped to handle. It appears that ATI cards have much less of a problem with these graphics methods. Nvidia is supposed to be working on a patch that would address the issue. Owners of 8800GTX/GTS cards are also reporting stuttering problems and other issues with the cards in this game.