by Rob Williams on February 19, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
AMD’s Radeon HD 5850 may not be the company’s highest-end card, but it still packs a wicked punch. Plus, when overclocked, and overclocked well, it can come close to the peformance of the top-end HD 5870. With the design of Sapphire’s Toxic graphics card, hitting heights like this seem to be made all too simple.
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.
We’re back on track here (no pun), with the Toxic placing just ahead of the reference-clocked HD 5850, as we’d expect.
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ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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87
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106.43
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ATI HD 5770 1GB CrossFireX
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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81
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104.32
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NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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84
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103.958
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ATI HD 5850 1GB (Sapphire Toxic)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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72
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89.933
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ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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68
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84.732
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NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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54
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66.042
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NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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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
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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
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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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Once again, GRID is one of those games that runs well on almost anything, and especially a higher-end card like the HD 5850. Therefore, 2560×1600 at maxed settings was no issue at all, so it naturally becomes our best playable setting.