ASUS Radeon EAH5850

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.

Despite being quite the powerful card, the GTX 295 doesn’t perform too well in games that doesn’t take advantage of multi-GPU setups. GRID is the obvious exception, and as a result, the HD 5850 falls right behind it. Still, it offers extremely good performance, at trust me, at 80+ FPS in a racing title, that kind of performance is appreciated.

GRID offers anti-aliasing options above 4xAA, but in all my tests in the past, they’re extremely buggy, so they’re a non-option. Given that, and the performance of our 2560×1600 setting, that remains our best playable.