GRID Legends PC Performance Analysis

Last month, Electronic Arts and Codemasters released the latest part in their GRID series, GRID Legends. Powered by the EGO Engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.

For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64,  RX 6900XT, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti and RTX 3080. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 511.79 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 22.2.3 drivers.

Codemasters has included a respectable amount of graphics settings. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Lighting, Textures, Anti-aliasing, Post-Process, Shadows, Particles and Reflections. There are also settings for Crowd, Mirrors, Weather Effects, Ambient Occlusion, Ground Cover, Skidmarks and LOD. Unfortunately, though, the game does not support any PC-only features, like DLSS or FSR. Moreover, there is no support for any Ray Tracing effects.

GRID Legends does not have any built-in benchmark tool. As such, and for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we’ve decided to test the first story race.

In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. Surprisingly enough, and without Hyper-Threading, our simulated dual-core system was able to run the game with 60fps at 1080p/Ultra Settings. However, our gaming experience wasn’t smooth at all due to severe stuttering issues. Thankfully, and by simply enabling Hyper-Threading, we were able to eliminate these stutters.

GRID Legends does not also require a high-end GPU. Most of our GPUs were able to run the game smoothly at 1080p/Ultra Settings. Moreover, and similarly to other games using the EGO Engine, GRID Legends runs faster/better on AMD’s hardware.

At 1440p/Ultra, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 came close to a 60fps experience (though there were some drops to mid-50s). On the other hand, the RTX2080Ti, RTX3080 and RX 6900XT had no trouble at all running the game. As for 4K/Ultra, our top three GPUs were able to provide a constant 60fps experience.

Graphics-wise, GRID Legends looks great. However, the game looks almost identical to GRID 2019. I’m certain that there are some subtle differences between them. However, GRID Legends feels a bit disappointing, especially for a game releasing three years after its predecessor. That doesn’t mean that the game looks bad. Far from it. However, if you put GRID Legends and GRID 2019 side-by-side, you’ll have a hard time distinguishing them.

All in all, GRID Legends performs great on PC. The game does not require a high-end PC system, and can look (and run) great on numerous graphics cards. Additionally, we did not experience any stability issues, and there are proper keyboard/gamepad on-screen prompts. Nevertheless, it’s a bit disappointing that the game looks so identical to GRID 2019.

Enjoy!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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