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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  • NewCardNeeded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Even the R9 280X crossfire beats the GTX 780 Ti in SLI in several cases !!!!!!!! Note that I do mean the 280, it's not a typo. The 290X Crossfire *SLAUGHTERS* the 780 Ti in SLI AND it's a fraction of the price.
  • austinsguitar - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    okay okay...lets tell this guy about what happens after a new nvidia graphics card comes out shall we...first 2 weeks a card comes out (ALWAYS UN OPTIMIZED FOR SLI) 2 weeks later (ABSOLUTE SCALING WITH THE NEXT AVAILABLE DRIVER) happens every time dude. That little guy will be better in two weeks, just trust me
  • NewCardNeeded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I'm not so sure this time. Nvidia have held back the 780 Ti for months until AMD released their new cards. They've had plenty of time to optimize for SLI. Expect small gains yes, but nothing more.

    Let's see what happens when mantle comes out...
  • austinsguitar - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Temperature, power (wattage), noise....This beats the 290x bad....
    Think about this....95 degrees and the ungodly noise coming from the 290x is ABSOLUTELY "UN"ACCEPTABLE... The card is cheap yes, but after 2 years of game playing your energy bill will determine that factor. I do realize that amd's drivers are getting better, but come on people....mantle?
  • NewCardNeeded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Have you never heard of a "third party cooler"?

    Coming this way soon !
  • NewCardNeeded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Read the article again without your green tinted glasses on!

    Full load on Crysis 3:

    Power (W):
    780 Ti = 372
    290X = 375

    Does it really beat the 290X bad?
  • austinsguitar - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    oh im sorry i was speaking about crossfire and sli configurations when putting into account the power draw... and everyone knows that when nvidia plays its games at 60 it clocks things lower, and power draw is very impressive...odds are these cards will never see below 60 for a while now, and nvidia's power draw at medium loads are phenomenal.
  • Kutark - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Jesus Christ, i've been reading the comments. The AMD fanbois are starting to get worse than Biodrones were during the release of TORtanic. Granted there is some definite Nvidia fanboism going on but the reality is this. Nvidia is on a 9 month old architecture and is able to put out a card that beats AMD's brand new architecture's top dawg by roughly 10%, running at a significantly lower temperature, and significantly quieter.

    Does that justify a $200 price gap? Well thats up to the consumer to decide. But to try to suggest this is a "Tie" or anything other than Nvidia reclaiming the fastest single card crown is just being ridiculous.

    I just find it hilarious some of these AMD people sitting here spouting off these very specific scenarios where the AMD card comes out on top and acts like that means anything. Ok, so crossfire 290x (only a thousand dollars!) beats sli 780ti's in several cases, whoopety do. This will affect all of the 1/10th of 1% of people who will pay that kind of money for a graphical solution on their gaming rigs.

    The other thing is, Nvidia's architecture is 9 months old for shits sake. You dont think they will have something else out in a few months thats going just crap all over AMD's new
  • Kutark - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Gah, stupid IE9 (im on a computer i can't install a good browser on). Anyways, i was just saying, Nvidia will likely release something early to mid 2014 which will probably blow any current gen cards out of the water and then where is AMD? Same spot they've been in?

    I'm glad AMD released the 290x, it is overall a HUGE step forward for them and im glad nvidia has some real competition. That is only a good thing for the consumer. But overblowing this 290x as something it isnt is not doing any favors. We need to stop blowing smoke up AMD's ass so they actually keep pushing themselves and come out with a proper Nvidia smasher, and then nvidia will be in a position that they cant keep charging 400-800 dollars for cards that should be 250-400 dollars.
  • UpSpin - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    I don't get your comment and I'm no GPU fanboy at all (even though I only bought NVidia GPUs in the past), because I barely game high end games and find such high prices (both AMD and NVidia) for a GPU ridiculous. But I'm interested in tech and consider buying a mid-tie GPU because my Nvidia GTX 560 TI starts acting strange.

    What matters is what NVIDIA or AMD sells now and what it costs now. It's a fact, that the 290X beats in half of the benchmarks the 780 Ti. The other half the 780 Ti wins. It's a fact, that the power draw between both single cards is identical. And it's a fact that the newly released 780 Ti is $150 more expensive than the newly released 290X.

    Of course is the 290X too loud, but that's not a issue of the GPU (same power draw), more of the cooler, which should be fixed with a third party cooler implemented by ASUS, ... The NVidia reference coolers were always superb (that's why I own a reference EVGA 560 Ti, because it was really silent compared to the similar priced alternatives).

    We live here and now and we can only buy the current stuff. So I don't care if Nvidia might release in the near or far future an even better card (at the time AMD might release a new card, too). And if you want to buy a GPU now, the Nvidia is, regarding the price, a complete rip off compared to the AMD.

    As an excuse for the 'poor' performance of the Nvidia card you said, it's 9 month technology. So let me get this straight:
    NVidia sells you 9 month old technology for $150 more than AMD asks you for the latest bleeding edge technolgy they can offer? And you defend this? Are you serious? Nvidia sold the Titan for even more during the last months. So be damn happy that AMD released such a great card at such a low price point, else you would get ripped off by NVidia the following months, too.

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