Enable Higher Resolutions for GRID on PC

Gaming
Screenshot of GRID running in 1080p resolution.

I’ve had the game GRID for a few years, but never got around to playing it. Now that I’m using an nVidia GeForce 770 video card, I wanted to enjoy the game in 1080p with all graphics options turned on. Unfortunately when I installed and started up the game, I was only able to select resolutions up to 1280px wide in the graphics settings for the game.

After a few minutes of internet searching, I found out why. GRID restricts the resolutions available based on the amount of video RAM it detects. The game isn’t able to correctly detect the amount of video RAM on some newer cards (including mine, I guess), so it falls back to assuming there is only enough to run the game in 720p or lower resolutions.

Fortunately I found a solution at http://www.wsgf.org/dr/race-driver-grid. GRID creates a file called hardware_settings_restrictions.xml that specifies—among other things—what hardware capabilities are available to the game. For me, the file was located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Codemasters\GRID\system This bit of code at the bottom of the file indicates how much video RAM the game detected and the highest resolution width available in the game’s graphics settings:

<data>
    <res mem="270" maxWidth="1280" />
</data>

The solution recommends removing this block of code, but I chose to update it with the correct amount of video RAM as well as a resolution width that is large enough for nVidia Surround resolutions:

<data>
    <res mem="4096" maxWidth="7000" />
</data>

The next time I started the game, I was able to select 1920×1080 resolution! I also tried nVidia Surround, but the in-game menus are zoomed in (vert- in FOV terms) which makes it very difficult to navigate them between races. I’ll stick with 1080p for now.

Screenshot of the graphics settings screen in GRID with 1920x1080 resolution selected.
GRID supports 1920×1080 resolution with enought video RAM present.

Comments

  1. very helpfull.. it worked for me :D thankyou very much putting the right solution online
  2. Thanks for this info, I found the hardware configurations and I preset a 1080 option but in game it would remain blank but all my other settings were there. This restriction update gave it what was needed.

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