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.







Race Driver: GRID is a relatively easy game to crack as far as frame rates are concerned but it still came as a pleasant surprise that the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB was able to provide a minimum frame rate of 29fps at 1,920 x 1,200 8xAA 16xAF and even managed a minimum of 27fps at 2,650 x 1,600 0xAA 16xAF where the game looked fantastic.

GRID is one of the oldest games in our line-up but it was still interesting to see how the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB stacked up against the competition. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB and Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB exchanged first place with one or the other, pipping the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB in every test but by some pretty slender margins. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 512MB and XFX GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition 384MB were firmly battered into submission except at 1,920 x 1,200 8xAA 16xAF where the ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB made a small comeback.