Playing on the PS5 is a fast and unencumbered experience, while the PC will have you tapping your gas pedal during lengthy loads. An early example is the epilepsy warning that appears when the game is doing its initial load 24 seconds on PC and 3 seconds on PS5.
Nothing on the PS5 takes longer than five second to load while the PC can take 10-20 seconds or more. My SSD in the PC is fast but no comparison for the M.2 NVMe drive on the PS5. Everything on the PC takes much longer to load from the opening splash screens to the individual race events once you are finally in the game. Occupying 50+ GB of space on the PC, GRID Legends does tip the scales in its favor in some areas while faltering in others and the first noticeable difference is in load times. Any dreams of fancy ray-traced reflections or shadows are dashed. You’ll likely figure that out if you look at the Steam recommended specs which suggest a GTX1080 or RX590 card. Even stacking up against other racing games like Forza Horizon 5, Gran Turismo 7, and even Codemasters own DIRT 5, this game does seem a bit stuck in time.
Sadly, GRID Legends is not a current gen exclusive on console good news for those still stuck with their PS4 and Xbox One consoles, but bad news for those looking for a generational leap in quality. Obviously, you can play GRID Legends on lesser, more affordable PC’s, but your experience will scale accordingly. Considering the pros and cons of both formats it is impressive what Sony can do for a sixth of the price. I only mention price because we’re comparing to a console that costs $400-500 assuming you can find one.
As you are about to find out, there isn’t much difference.įor this review I was playing on an i9-9900 with 16mb RAM, an EVGA RTX3080 card, and a Samsung 860 Pro 1TB drive a system that cost $3200 when bought back in early 2019 and later upgraded with the $800 video card in November of 2020. If you want to know more about actual gameplay and content specifics, then I encourage you to read Travis’ comprehensive coverage of the PS5 game.
For the most part, this will be a technical review and comparison to the PS5. GRID Legends has been out for a few weeks now and we already have a review and gameplay video available for the PlayStation 5 version of the game, but I wanted to take a quick look at the PC version to see if a powerful rig could push this game to new levels of excellence.