GT Legends (Windows, 2005)

1920x1080, full quality, 4xSupersampling

Min spec: 64 MB DirectX 8.1 card, Pentium III, 512 MB RAM
Rec spec: 256 MB DirectX 9.0c card, Pentium 4 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Where to get it: Steam (£4.99) NB: DRM-free

Saints Row 2 proved to be at the limit of my PC's abilities, but this time I have a couple of advantages. First, GT Legends is three years older, and so has significantly lower minimum and recommended hardware levels. Second, it's a game I've owned for years and that I'm actually reasonably good at!

For testing purposes, I entered 20-car races (ie me and 19 AI opponents) at the Donington National and Mondello Short tracks included with the game. I decided to use the in-car cockpit view, since GT Legends is enough of a sim (by 2005 standards) that most players are likely to use this camera setting.

The news is encouraging. At 1920x1080 on Full quality settings, with 4x Supersampling enabled, I generally got low-mid 30s fps in the thick of racing action, although this did dip to the mid-20s at the start. Take Supersampling off and things start to look a bit on the jaggy side, but the switch adds 5-10 fps to the score.

GT Legends doesn't lose much of its visual appeal if you drop the resolution to 1366x768, but keep Supersampling on, and at that point you can generally count on mid-40s fps most of the time. Avoid switching up shadows to full or enabling swaying trees as these can be substantial fps hits; you hardly notice them at 100+ mph anyway!

The cockpit view is middling in terms of fps. Bonnet and nose cameras might add 10% to your frame rate, but the chase view delivers a fairly hard hit – as much as 25% in some cases. If you're merely hotlapping rather than racing, you can pretty much do what you like. Note that some third-party tracks are a bit heavier graphically than the inbuilt circuits.

There's no doubt in my mind that GT Legends is highly playable with the Intel HD 2500 GPU integrated into my i3-3220. With a little tweaking, perhaps dropping down to 1280x720 or disabling a couple of effects, i3s with the slightly slower HD 2000 shouldn't have too much of a problem either.

Next time: SuperTuxKart (Linux)