Benchmark Results: Race Driver GRID
Race Driver GRID is probably the best-looking auto racing game available for the PC, so we decided to add it to our benchmarks this time around and see how demanding it really is:
These results are a little puzzling, with all of these frame rates hovering around 60 frames per second (FPS) . We would usually expect that the vsync option was turned on. After checking and re-checking, we confirmed it had been set to off, so the reason for the unusually small variance in frame rates is probably a CPU bottleneck. If that’s the case, turning on AA might make the results a little more meaningful:
With 4xAA applied, frame rates are only lowered slightly, but the spread is a little greater. While we’re definitely seeing some bottlenecking, we can also see that this title favors the Radeon HD 4830 over the GeForce 8800 GT.
On a side note, we will mention that GRID is one of those games that really does require AA for the best visuals. Fortunately, the game engine seems very easy on the video cards and even the single-card configurations were able to provide 4xAA with playable frame rates.
