Race Driver: GRID

Publisher: Codemasters

Race Driver: GRID is one of the best racing games to grace the PC in some time, striking a fine balance between automotive simulation and arcade throttle-fest which has resulted in an enormously entertaining game. Players can choose from racing tuned saloons through city streets, through to driving Lamborghinis around Le Mans, with all cars displaying a highly detailed damage model.

GRID runs on a modified version of Codemasters' own in house Neon engine, rechristened Ego for GRID. This will also be the engine used in the highly anticipated Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising, so hopefully GRID will give us a good indication of how hardware will perform in this future title too. Despite only supporting DirectX 9.0c, GRID features a lot of high level graphical features, including motion blur, fantastic smoke effects, dynamic track side details and thousands of fully 3D spectators.

To test performance in GRID, we raced a lap of the "San Francisco Short Circuit" track in the RADT Nissan Skyline Z-tune, starting from the back of the grid to ensure as many cars on screen for as long as possible. We chose the San Francisco circuit due to the large amount of dynamic track side details like flags and spectators visible from the track, and for the close proximity of track side objects.

However, GRID does not support anisotropic filtering in game, so we had to force this to 16x using the Forceware and Catalyst drivers. We captured the average and minimum frame rates during the lap, and the results you see below are indicative of around one minute and forty seconds of gameplay (average lap time) per setting.








Race Driver: GRID shows some reasonable performance improvements, but they aren't quite linear with the clock speed enhancements on BFG Tech's GeForce GTX 285 OCX. At 1,920 x 1,200 8xAA 16xAF and 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA, the performance advantage over a stock GeForce GTX 285 equates to roughly six percent and that drops down to five percent at settings that aren't quite so GPU bound.

Unfortunately for the GeForce GTX 285, this is a game where ATI's CrossFire performance is strong and so the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB always has an edge over the competition from Nvidia. It equates to around 21 percent at 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF and the advantage isn't quite so profound - but still significant nevertheless - at lower resolutions.