Feral Interactive’s iOS port of Codemasters’ 2014 racing masterpiece GRID Autosport ($9.99) really revved our engines when it hit the App Store just under a year ago. Ok that was terribly corny wordplay, but in all seriousness GRID Autosport was easily the most full featured racing game available on mobile and, being that it was a port of a relatively recent console and PC game, it also looked incredible. I’m not even a huge racing game fan but GRID had that special sauce that has made it one of my favorite mobile games, and that initial release was so impressive in so many ways I was completely satisfied with the game as is. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for Feral, as back in September they announced that they were hard at work on a new update for GRID that would improve the visuals even further in a number of different ways for the variety of iOS devices that the game supported. Today that update has gone live and holy moly is it a doozy.

First of all Feral has put together a cool page on their website where you can actually see a couple of screenshots of GRID both before and after today’s update, and use a slider to see the differences between them for yourself. I LOVE those slider comparisons, and even when you’re looking at the “before" screen you’re thinking to yourself “Damn that looks good!" but then you slide over to the “after" screen and it’s like your jaw hits the floor. Seriously I don’t know what sort of magic Feral is using to juice these kinds of visuals out of the game, but I’m not complaining. And for an even better reference you can check out the trailer below which shows the updated and non-updated versions side-by-side, as well as another brief video just below that which shows the updated visuals on an iPhone XS Max specifically.

So you might be wondering how today’s update affects GRID Autosport on your specific device, and that information is laid out on that Feral website page linked above or in the update notes, but I’ll quickly copy it down here too.

• iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus are now officially supported
• iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max are now officially supported
• Significantly improved performance, graphics and resolution across all supported iPhones and iPads
• Improved lighting and reflections, including new lighting effects during night races, on the iPhone 7 and newer, and all supported iPads
• Adds real-time dynamic car shadows on the iPhone 7 and newer, and all supported iPads
• Adds enhanced particle effects on the iPhone 7 and newer, iPad (2018), and iPad Pro (2015 and newer)
• Adds per-object motion blur and depth of field on the iPhone 8 and newer, and iPad Pro (2017)
• Adds real-time car reflections for the iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max
• Makes a number of additional improvements and minor bug fixes

In case it wasn’t perfectly clear from the tone of this post, we’re big fans of GRID Autosport and you can read more of our thoughts about it in our full review and our Game of the Week post from when it released last year. GRID allows a staggering amount of options which let you tailor the game for your specific tastes whether they skew towards more of a simulation or more of an arcade experience, and thanks to today’s update that experience looks better than ever no matter which supported iOS device you own.