by Rob Williams on March 29, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
We’ve learned a lot about NVIDIA’s GF100 (Fermi) architecture over the past year, and after what seemed like an eternal wait, the company has officially announced the first two cards as part of the series; the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. To start, we’re taking a look at the latter, so read on to see if it GF100 was worth the wait.
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, so it’s of little surprise to see the HD 5870 outpace it. But again, the real-world difference is minimal, so it’s as though there’s no difference at all.
|
|
|
|
ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
83
|
103.622
|
ATI HD 5770 1GB CrossFireX
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
81
|
104.32
|
NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
84
|
103.958
|
NVIDIA GTX 480 1.5GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
81
|
98.578
|
ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
68
|
84.732
|
NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
54
|
66.042
|
ATI HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
53
|
65.584
|
NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
52
|
63.617
|
ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
45
|
56.980
|
NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
45
|
54.809
|
ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
39
|
47.05
|
NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
35
|
43.663
|
ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)
|
1920×1080 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
36
|
47.36
|
ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)
|
1920×1080 – Max Detail, 0xAA
|
33
|
41.143
|
NVIDIA GT 240 512MB (ASUS)
|
1920×1080 – Max Detail, 0xAA
|
33
|
51.071
|
Once again, GRID is one of those games that runs well on almost anything, therefore, 2560×1600 at maxed settings was no issue at all. Naturally, it becomes our best playable setting.