ATI Radeon HD 5830 – AMD Completes its HD 5000 Line-up

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 another game that tends to favor ATI cards to some small degree, and that works to the HD 5830’s favor as it manages to outpace the GTX 275 at our top resolution of 2560×1600.

Once again, GRID is one of those games that runs well on almost anything, and especially on a card like the HD 5830. Therefore, 2560×1600 at maxed settings was no issue at all, so it naturally becomes our best playable setting.