ATI’s Eyefinity: 18 Games Benched on 3 and 6 Displays

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.

The first genre to come to mind for me when picturing a multi-display setup is racing, and if you’re a fan of the genre, then you probably understand why. You simply get so much of the big picture and it feels a lot more realistic. It’s also one of the few genres that makes it easy to ignore the bezels. After playing various racing games with all six monitors, I can honestly say I’d hate to go back to anything else. It’s an absolute blast.

Despite GRID being released long before Eyefinity, the game looks remarkable at both resolutions. The in-race UI isn’t placed ideally (you may disagree), but it doesn’t impede gameplay at all. The game scales well, with no stretching aside from the menus (a common issue)… in-game, it looks great. The proof is in the screenshots above.

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.

As good as GRID looks even by today’s standards, the performance was good all-around at maxed-out detail settings, which includes 4xAA (the game doesn’t run well with higher AA levels for whatever reason, and it’s not Eyefinity-specific).

Unfortunately, the game didn’t agree with CrossFireX at 5760×2160, as sporadically during races the game would just slow down, or lock up for a split-second, essentially ruining the gameplay. There was no such issue at 5760×1080, however. Thankfully, a single GPU is all that’s needed to deliver very playable framerates, so the lack of CrossFireX is a non-issue.