by Rob Williams on May 10, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
This past February, AMD quietly launched the Radeon HD 5550 alongside the much more touted HD 5570. At about $10 less than that card, the HD 5550 is an unusual breed. To help put all of the pieces together, Sapphire sent us its “Ultimate” edition of the card, which uses reference clock speeds, but features a very effective passive cooler.
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.


If you don’t have your heart set on high framerates, you can get by just fine in an FPS, but for a racing game, it’s a whole new ball game (or should that be race track?). With this genre, you -need- high framerates, because precision counts. So what could we muster after lowering some settings?
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|
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ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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83
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103.622
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ATI HD 5770 1GB CrossFireX
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
81
|
104.32
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NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
84
|
103.958
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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
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NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
54
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66.042
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ATI HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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53
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65.584
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NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
52
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63.617
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ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
45
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56.980
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NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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45
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54.809
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ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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39
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47.05
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NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
|
35
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43.663
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ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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36
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47.36
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ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, 0xAA
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33
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41.143
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NVIDIA GT 240 512MB (ASUS)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, 0xAA
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33
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51.071
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ATI HD 5550 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Medium Detail, 0xAA
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25
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33.275
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Not to sound like a broken record, but once again, medium details were our savior. Even though the average frame rates didn’t drastically increase, the playability did. Unfortunately though, disabling AA in this particular title is something that should be avoided, because it’s truly ugly afterward. Even the in-game fonts are jagged!