ATI Radeon HD 5570 – Sub-$100 HTPC & Gaming Solution

If you primarily play games on a console, your choices for quality racing games are plenty. On the PC, that’s not so much the case. While there are a good number, there aren’t enough for a given type of racing game, from sim, to arcade. So when Race Driver: GRID first saw its release, many gamers were excited, and for good reason. It’s not a sim in the truest sense of the word, but it’s certainly not arcade, either. It’s somewhere in between.

The game happens to be great fun, though, and similar to console games like Project Gotham Racing, you need a lot of skill to succeed at the game’s default difficulty level. And like most great racing games, GRID happens to look absolutely stellar, and each of the game’s locations look very similar to their real-world counterparts. All in all, no racing fan should ignore this one.

Manual Run-through: For our testing here, we choose the city where both Snoop Dogg and Sublime hit their fame, the LBC, also known as Long Beach City. We choose this level because it’s not overly difficult, and also because it’s simply nice to look at. Our run consists of an entire 2-lap race, with the cars behind us for almost the entire race.

I admit that I was surprised to see the card handle GRID so well. The gameplay wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t at all sluggish, even at 1080p.

If the HD 5570 has anything on NVIDIA’s lower-end cards, it’s that it can handle GRID at all. For some reason, on both the GT 220 and GT 240, the game is just laggy, and unplayable. ATI’s card handles it just fine.