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.








GRID is another game that can take advantage of extra graphics memory, with the Sapphire Vapor-X consistently posting a higher average frame rate than the 1GB HD 4870. It's interesting that the minimums of the two cards are (give or take an odd 1fps) identical - it would seem that the game can cache more data to the 2GB of memory of the Vapor-X card.

Only at 1,920 x 1,200 with 8x AA is the Vapor-X faster than the GTX 275 - at every other setting, the GTX 275 is a bit faster. However, GRID is so friendly to GPUs that it doesn't really matter - both cards can comfortably run the game at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA.