Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB

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.

Many racing games loathe slower graphics cards, but GRID has little to worry about, as even our lowly HD 4770 delivered a staggering 70 FPS at 1920×1080, which included 4x anti-aliasing and totally maxed out detail settings. Even the minimum FPS we saw was pretty amazing. Any player of this game with at least this graphics card isn’t going to have too much to complain about.

If our Call of Juarez and F.E.A.R. 2 results were anything to go by, you’d immediately assume that given the nice performance at 1920×1080, this game might be playable at 2560×1600. That wasn’t the case here, though, because GRID remains as a game that’s hungry for graphics memory, and because of this, the game ran at less than 1 FPS simply at the main menu, when running 2560×1600. No amount of tweaking was going to make the game run well there, so we stuck with 1920×1080 as our best playable.