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 "Circuito Di Milano B" 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 Milan 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 is another game in which multi-GPU solutions don't seem to scale particularly well at lower resolutions – you'll notice the 4870 X2 languishing mid table at 1,680 x 1,050 rather than sitting atop it as it usually does. Nevertheless, both our SLI and CrossFire set ups post results superior to their single GPU iterations, although the 9800 GTX+ in SLI disappoints a little with results some way below those of a GeForce GTX 280 until 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA, and then it once again falls over once AA is enabled.

The HD 4850 in CrossFire continues to impress though, and while results at lower resolutions are a little disappointing, at higher resolutions the scaling is very impressive; at 2,560 x 1,600 it performs almost twice as well as a single HD 4850!