Graphics

GRID runs on an updated version of the Colin McRae: DIRT Neon engine, now renamed Ego, and with everything turned up looks absolutely incredible. Motion blur combines with great looking smoke effects, reflections and shadows to create a seriously immersive visual experience, with the urban racing environments looking especially awesome.

In the graphics menu we find presets for Ultra, High, Medium, Low and Ultra Low detail levels, but interestingly none actually alter the core car texture quality, only allowing you to disable extra visual effects, and alter the texture quality of less important features like trees and the drivers.

This works surprisingly well, and means that those with low end machines won’t be stuck looking at the back of a car and not knowing if it’s a Koenigsegg or a Kia, whilst those of us with modern machines will still be able to appreciate GRID in all its motion blurring reflective goodness.

This becomes increasingly important when you see just how demanding GRID can be. I reviewed the game on an Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 with 4GB of RAM, and struggled to grab a frame rate of over 30 fps using the ultra preset at 1,600 x 1,200. However, my second machine, running an 8800 GTS 640MB, an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 and 4GB of RAM was more than able to handle GRID in ultra settings, indicating that GRID has perhaps been more effectively optimised for Intel multi core processors. We'd certainly recommend a dual-core processor and a graphics card from a recent generation to run the game at ultra settings at a playable frame rate.


At ultra quality, we see the game at its best. Full detail levels on the shadows, track, drivers look great, and the full array of smoke, particle and reflection effects look fantastic. The downside is that you'll need a pretty beefy system to run the game at these settings. More likely, you're going to be playing the game on high-detail.


At high quality there is a slight dip in additional detail, and some of the lighting reflections have gone, but the impressive shdows and particle effects still remain. Medium sees another slight decrease in detail level, with noticeable drops in ground effects and the detail of cars at longer distances.


At low quality, we really start to see the compromises of lower graphical presets. The complex shadows have been replaced with simple ones, and the crowd have vanished from the stands, but track side and player car detail remains of noticeably high quality. The effect continues in ultra low, with all presets set to low or off. Although the game is still perfectly playable in this setting, you'll be missing out on a lot of the atmosphere created by the advanced graphical effects.