GRID 2

The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.

When it comes to GRID even cranking up the game’s quality settings to maximum hardly does anything to slow down our cards. At 90fps the GTX 780 Ti once again takes the top spot while delivering an extremely high framerate. This ultimately puts the GTX 780 Ti ahead of the 290X by 13%, while also beating the other GK110 cards by a bit more than average at 11% for GTX Titan and 23% for GTX 780.

Otherwise, moving on to 4K and multi-GPU setups, NVIDIA’s limited scaling once more becomes an issue. At 50fps for a single GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA starts off well enough, but we still need a second GPU to get above 60fps. And though GTX 780 Ti SLI will get us there, 290X CF and AMD’s superior scaling will get AMD there with room to spare.

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  • HisDivineOrder - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Sure, you can save money by buying into the R9 290X, but save that money because you're going to need it in a few years for a hearing aid.
  • OverclockedCeleron - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    As if there won't be any custom-cooled R290X-based GPUs. You make it sound like all GPU vendors and partners have abandoned AMD, and that AMD is going to be stuck with that fan forever. Well done for being short-sighted.
  • HalloweenJack - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    [img]http://assets.diylol.com/hfs/8fa/d87/4bb/resized/y...[/img]
  • halo37253 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Personally I find it Kinda sad given the Fact that GK110 is a much bigger chip in general it would have a bigger lead at stock. Plus powerusage while gaming goes back and forth with the titan, it is competing with. Nvidia just has more aggressive TDP throttling, while AMD's is mainly temp based.

    290x is only hot under stock cooler, It actually runs pretty cool under water. Also 290x is doing more with less transistors compared to Nvidia. Sucks Nvidia needs to scale Kepler to such a higer level just to compete with AMD's lower offerings. AMD would slaughter Nvidia with a Die of equal size.

    Also with the 290 being $399 Nvidia is boned, unless the drop the gtx780's price again. 290 @ 1300mhz is about the same as a 780 @ 1400mhz.

    G-Sync only works with one monitor so far, and considering I already have a 120hz monitor and already get a taste of wants to come I could care less. We won't see it in anything not overpriced for years to come, by that time we will probably have a open standard that both Intel and AMD can use. Plus I want a 1440p ISP with G-Sync and doubt that will happen any time soon. Mantle is by far a more interesting option if you ask me. I already with with vsync off and get no tearing and games are as smooth as ever with AMD's current drivers. Smoother then my old Nvidia card, though I just made the switch to AMD and never really had the chance to use the old "crap" drivers.
  • fewafwwaefwa - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    foad cretin.
  • fewafwwaefwa - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    hope you get your stomach disemboweled.
  • fewafwwaefwa - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I'd gladly saw your head open.
  • Samus - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    The problem with this card is the 25% price premium over AMD's 290X for 11% more performance.

    The only real advantage it has over the 290X is lower noise. Other than that it lacks next-gen optimizations (Mantel, EA partnership, console ports, etc.)
  • ahlan - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    http://s11.postimg.org/odh7byx3n/amd_N.png

    Lol most review site are Nvidia's bitch....
  • tcube - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    erm... 290x in uber mode is edged by what? 1-5%... I can't call this a win + GK110 has reached it's full potential. And 780Ti is basically an excelent GK110 chip castrated and sold for 700$ instead of the regular 4k$ (K6000) + they pushed GDDR5 to it's maximum to just edge the 290x... I don't know... This thing looks like vapor ware, let's see some availability but I doubt it's ok for nvidia to sell a perfectly good chip for what? 6 times less? Plus the last tests with 290 without the x show that 290x has lots of potential left

    How I see it 290x was rushed to market and suffers because of it bad cooler, high temperatures and slow memory... 780ti is the best of the Kepler architecture Oc'ed both memory & gpu with basically a pro grade chip and 30% more diespace and it just barelly edges out the 290x in uber mode.

    What AMD managed is to make nvidia divert perfect GK110's from pro line to mainstream and shifted their focus - which is a bad thing to do atm for nvidia. And nvidia reacted like a... fanboy really by scrambling to bring a lab rat on the market... just to barely claim the crown back... instead of focusing on maxwell and pro line improvements... They really behaved like little kids with ADHD with this one... but ... oh well...

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