GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches

GRID

Race Driver: GRID (GRID) is the latest addition to the TOCA Touring Car series, published and developed by Codemasters.  GRID was released in May-June , 2008, as a hybrid between arcade and simulator of mostly blacktop racing with over 40 cars.  GRID features ‘flashback’ and also has ‘instant replay’ features which allows the player to rewind time by a few seconds. While the instant replay can be used as many times as the player wants, the flashback feature can only be used for a limited number of times that are determined by the game’s difficulty setting.  There are several types of competitions for different cars and several tracks from different countries, including Japan, United States and European tracks.

Race Driver: GRID uses Codemasters’ own Ego engine which is an evolved version of the same Neon engine they used in their previous release, DIRT.   However, the damage code was completely rewritten to allow for persistent damage environments.  For GRID, we used “Real World” benching.   The same section of the same “San Francisco” track is tested repeatedly – after the other cars have passed – and the minimum, maximum and average frame rates are averaged, using FRAPS.  This benchmark was run many dozens of times to get relatively close figures and anything outside the “norm” was tossed out.   This chart is fairly representative of what you will encounter in-game when you are the only car on the track.  Since the game is eminently playable on all of our cards, we only tested at 19×12.

Wow, this game “belongs” to ATi.  What can we say?  The 4870-512MB performs very close to the more expensive and generally faster GTX280.  Although 4870X2 scales OK over 4870, crossfireX-3 shows much less improvement except in the minimum frame rates.