SuperTuxKart 1.5 has taken a scenic route to the finish line having spent nearly 3 years in development, but it’s finally reached the finish line — and lo: the road ahead splits.
Version 1.5 is likely to be the last release in the SuperTuxKart 1.x series (save for point release bug fixes). The project’s next destination? SuperTuxKart Evolution, a major v2.0 revamp aimed at breathing new life into this familiar FOSS classic.
But that’s all to come.
For now, this major new version of the iconic racing game is the highlight. It offers improved graphics (especially on lower-end hardware), new arenas and egg hunt tracks, a benchmarking mode, and a wider range of display and rendering controls.
SuperTuxKart 1.5 Highlights
Graphic quality in SuperTuxKart 1.5 is better than before thanks new Level of Detail (LoD) settings, shadow mapping and shader improvements. The game also looks significantly better when running on low and medium presets thanks to anisotropic filtering tweaks.
Earlier versions of SuperTuxKart let you set the maximum in-game frame rate to 120fps on desktop, or a lowly 30fps on Android. In SuperTuxKart 1.5 you can increase the maximum frame rate up to 1000.
Thanks to supersampling, the game can now be rendered at 200% the native resolution.
A new benchmarking mode lets you run a test race and see performance-related results next to active graphics settings. This lets you easily see what performance impact (if any) different combinations of settings have. The results can be saved to file too.
SuperTuxKart’s main window can also be easily resized. You’ll find preset resolutions and window sizes, fullscreen toggle and camera options in a new, dedicated Display tab.
Other changes in SuperTuxKart 1.5:
- 3 new Soccer mode fields: Oasis, Hole Drop and XR-4R3N4
- 3 new egg hunt tracks: Black Forest, Gran Paradisio Island & The Old Mine
- Visually improved overworld
- Tracks, karts and arenas can be marked as favourites
- Support for searching karts and arenas by name
- Karts can be grouped by class
- New parachute and bubblegum shield animations
- Granular game audio level controls
- New ‘cartoon skins’ for main UI
- New music for Las Dunas Arena/Las Dunas Soccer
- Karts with headlights can now use spotlights
Reams of bugs, glitches and other in-game gremlins have been resolved in this update. Sift through the SuperTuxKart 1.5 changelog for more details on those, and other changes made in this release.
You can also see many of the changes in action in this spiffy release trailer from the STK team:
Interested in taking SuperTuxKart 1.5 for a spin?
Download SuperTuxKart 1.5
The new version is available to download for Windows, macOS, Android and Linux right now, with links on the SuperTuxKart website.
You can also download SuperTuxKart 1.5 binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS from the SuperTuxKart GitHub release page directly. You will need to toggle the ‘assets’ label to see all available files attached to the latest release.
If you’re on Linux (I’ve a feeling you might be), download the tar.gz which matches your CPU architecture (32-bit, 64-bit or Arm64). Then extract the archive and enter the folder to find run_game.sh and double-click on it to run the game.
Want to install SuperTuxKart 1.5 on Ubuntu? The update should land on Flathub (or through a PPA) at some point (not available at the time of writing). Avoid the the SuperTuxKart snap as it’s very out of date (version 1.3 – the new version is 1.5).