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.






GRID is a sea of red at lower resolutions and even at 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA, the Radeon HD 4870 is faster than anything Nvidia has to offer. In fact, even at 2,560 x 1,600 with AA enabled, the 4870 is faster, but we actually start to see Nvidia's cards fight back - with 2xAA applied, the GeForce GTX 280, GTX 260 and BFG Tech's GTX 260 OCX Maxcore close the gap, but aren't quicker.

At these settings, the BFG Tech GTX 260 OCX Maxcore is around three percent slower than a full-fat GeForce GTX 280 at Nvidia's reference clock speeds.