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.








Ever since we've been using it for benchmarking purposes, Race Driver: GRID has been a game where ATI's cards have shone, and that certainly doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon. While Nvidia has improved the driver profile, boosting performance across the board in both single card and multi card configurations, the GTX 295 is still only able to outperform the 4870 X2 at low resolutions when anti-aliasing is disabled, and SLI GTX 295 failed to work at all - this was a real disappointment.

It's a known driver bug, but the game is basically unplayable with two GeForce GTX 295s even when it doesn't crash out - we suffered from horrible micro and macro stuttering at just 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA, the only resolution where we could actually get the cards to run the game (albeit with FRAPS disabled).