The Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown system requirements have been released, and they’ve left us completely bemused. In what appears to be an attempt to keep the GPU demands low, excessive upscaling is recommended in what leads to an actual rendering resolution of 640 x 360, which is then upscaled to 1080p.
Few games will list the best graphics card models in their system requirements, unless we’re talking about ultra or 4K tiers. This is to prevent scaring off gamers who may have older systems. With Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown, however, the minimum requirements almost feel misleading given the compromises required to get the game running on an Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU.
Here are the Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown system requirements:
| Minimum (1080p, 30fps, FSR 2 Ultra Performance) | Recommended (1080p, 60fps, DLSS or FSR 2 Balanced) | |
| OS | Windows 10 or later | Windows 10 or later |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 AMD Radeon RX 480 Intel Arc A380 |
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 AMD Radeon RX 6650 |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 7700K AMD Ryzen 7 1800X |
Intel Core i7 11700K AMD Ryzen 7 3700X |
| RAM | 12GB | 12GB |
| Storage | 50GB SSD | 50GB SSD |
If you ignore the performance targets for both the minimum and recommended specs, the Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown system requirements appear similar to many other modern games with high-fidelity visuals.
We sometimes see the minimum performance resolution noted as 720p, but instead, here it is noted as 1080p, but with FSR 2 set to Ultra Performance. What this does is reduce the native rendering resolution and then upscale it to fit your selected output resolution. Given that the GTX 1660 doesn’t even support Nvidia DLSS, that means owners of this GPU will need to enable FSR 2 at an extreme setting.
At 1,920 x 1,080, using Ultra Performance upscaling drops the rendering resolution to 640 x 360, and then uses scaling to stretch the image back up to 1080p, which can lead to a range of issues such as blurring and even mild input delay in extreme cases. This is far from ideal, and relying so heavily on this level of upscaling at minimum requirements feels disingenuous.
While aging PC hardware is still capable of getting the job done for some games, it would perhaps make more sense to just raise the system requirements to the point where the game runs at 30fps with a 1080p resolution, with minimal upscaling help. Including an extreme level of FSR, DLSS, or XeSS as part of system requirements feels like a trap that developers should avoid falling into.
I look forward to testing out the game on both my Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 rig and the Steam Deck to get an idea of the performance at two very different power levels. Early reports suggest that the game is lacking some polish on PC, but we’ll be diving into this title shortly to assess performance and report on how to maximize your fps regardless of where you play.
Take our Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown PC benchmark test to answer the question… Can I run Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown?