ATI Radeon HD 5770 – DirectX 11 for the Masses

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.

GRID is one game that favors ATI cards, but that didn’t matter too much here as the GTX 260 still managed to beat it out, except in the top-end. But despite that, the results from all of our tested cards is good, and with the HD 5770 achieving almost 60 FPS at 2560×1600 with 4xAA, we’re doubtful too many people will be complaining.

If it works, don’t mess with it, and that’s a good mantra to live by with GRID. The game runs well regardless of the settings you use (assuming you don’t push anti-aliasing higher than 4x), so 2560×1600 with maxed settings is our best playable.