Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X

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.

Both the reference-clocked and Vapor-X cards really strut their stuff here, offering incredible performance at any resolution. When a card can deliver over 100 FPS at top settings in a game as great-looking as GRID, you know it’s a quality card.

I had high hopes that the HD 5870 would be the first card to handle GRID at 8xAA, but thanks to the fact that the game is seemingly buggy when using that setting, we were forced to stick with 4xAA. Fortunately, when you are driving at over 100MPH, the need for ultra-high AA becomes less important.