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.






At 1,680 x 1,050, the cluster of RV770 core based GPUs at the top of our results board indicates that at this resolution, Race Driver: GRID is primarily CPU limited. However, at higher resolutions we continue to see AMD's cards dominate and it's not until 2,560 x 1,600 with 2xAA that the GT200 based GTX 280 and GTX 260 are able to overtake the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ and Radeon HD 4870.

In comparison to the stock clocked HD 4850, the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ offers a consistent frame rate advantage of around five percent in every test.