YouGamers.com

Reviews

Driver: Parallel Lines

Developed for the PS2

While some of the textures seem to have received a facelift when the game was ported over, the polygon counts betray the PS2 origins. Nothing has been done to the models, and it's painfully obvious when cruising around the city. While the play area is admirably large, the majority of the buildings, trees, fences... everything you see around you is done with very tight polygon budgets, resulting in a blocky cityscape. It's not horribly bad compared to, say, the latest GTA, but Driver: Parallel Lines fails to improve in this regard in any way. There is a liberal amount of "copypasting" of textures to a point where it becomes visually distracting, and somehow the whole atmosphere of a busy city is missing. The modern (2006) New York does look a bit better than the earlier 1978 city, but both versions suffer from the fact that everything in the environments was developed with the PS2 limitations in mind.

Scaling with hardware

As Driver: Parallel Lines is a console port, you can run it on a pretty basic system with the disclaimer that you need to cut down the shiny. Minimum memory requirement is total fantasy, as there are horrible pauses for loading even with 512MB RAM, but otherwise the game does run on rather old video cards if you switch off the modern shaders, shadows and the normal mapping effects. On weaker modern cards you will have to turn off the SM2.0 shaders for acceptable frame rate, but the loss in looks is not that huge.

Everything set at maximum, shadows and SM2.0 shaders enabled.	Switched to PS1.x shaders, shadows off.
PS2.0 shiny enabled.	PS1.x shaders - much faster even with shadows enabled.

The CPU matters very little here; the only times we saw the frame rate scaling with CPU was when all the visuals were turned down with a fast video card. The YouGamers minimum system will run the game smoothly with SM1.x shaders while the recommended system allows you to maximize the visual quality while retaining constant 30FPS+. A bit slower system can still run the game, as long as you have 1GB RAM, but the frame rate doesn't stay constant so expect to bust up your car a few times here and there when the game decides to skip a beat during fast chases.

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4

Related Stuff

Tags