AMD’s HD 5550 & 5570 – Now Equipped with GDDR5 Goodness

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.

The performance boosts with GRID are not quite as spectacular as what we saw with Modern Warfare 2 and Bound in Blood, but the “free” gains we do see are nonetheless impressive. I can’t see too many people complaining about a 50% performance boost on the HD 5550, if pricing does indeed remain identical as we’re being promised.

Both of our HD 5570’s shared the same top-end settings, as the game couldn’t be pushed further, so we again see a simple performance boost. The HD 5550 equipped with GDDR5 allowed us to increase the detail level from low to medium and still retain great framerates.