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 (see what I did there) 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.






AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4670 comes back at the supercharged XFX GeForce 9600 GSO a little bit in GRID - it ends up being quite a close battle between the two cards when anti-aliasing is enabled. There's just 0.1 frames per second in it at 1,680 x 1,050, with both cards delivering playable frame rates and identical minimums.

The XFX GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition does pull away with anti-aliasing is disabled though - it's almost 15fps faster at 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA and 9fps faster at 1,680 x 1,050. However, since the game is very smooth and playable with AA turned on, why on earth would you disable it?