Colin McRae Dirt 2 VGA Graphics performance review

Codemasters has published the system requirements for Colin McRae: DiRT 2. While the most of us mortals can still run the game in non-DirectX11 mode you will need only an average PC rig to play the game with the updated graphics.

Recommended Specifications: Enhanced for DirectX 11:

• OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Core i7 or AMD Phenom II
• Memory: 3GB
• HD Space: 10GB
• Video Card: ATi Radeon HD 5700 Series

Minimum Specifications:

• OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 3400+
• Memory: 1GB (2Gb for Windows Vista)
• HD Space: 10GB
• Video Card: ATI Radeon X1500 or NVIDIA GeForce 6800

Our test today as stated will be our own test run in the Baja level. In the test we'll throw in a couple of NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards and Radeon HD series 5000. We'll measure at DX 9 with that combo and then separately we look at DX11 performance with the DX11 ready Radeon HD 5750, 5770, 5850, 5870 and butter-sweet 5970.

Codemasters takes advantage of DirectX 11 features to add some more realism of the racing environment. You'll notice improved appearance of water with the help of displacement mapping and other surfaces as well as complex crowd animations which are tessellated for more rich detail.

The performance of Shader Model 5.0 will aid in creating a more richer 3D experience, enhancing key image quality parameters such as depth of field, ambient occlusion and shadows.

Now we can show you all this with still screenshots -- but CodeMaster ATI made a beautiful video demonstrating the key DX11 features used in this title. We have two video's for you to have a look at which explain the technologies like Hardware Tesselation, Displacement mapping and  - a Gameplay demo and a DX 11 technology demo -- enjoy !

In the demo above you can see a technology demo rendered with DX11 class features, Have a good look at Cloth animation which quite honestly hints to PhysX a lot doesn't it ?  -- the natural movement of a moving cloth slash wind effect :)  Then the massive crowd is being rendered with a feature called stream out which we explained many times already in out graphics card reference reviews (available since DX10) with stream out you can hardware instance objects and multiply popel. Now what codemasters did was apply hardware tessellation on the people as well. So not only do we have a lot of people in that crowd, the detail is much richer as well.

The water effect then, have a good look how it moves and behaves towards the car riding through it, that's thanks to displacement mapping. Not visible in the demo just yet will be improved lightning and more complex post processing to enhance image quality, the video above however will already show these features.

Now the second video is just a teaser video provided by Codemasters. Some extra eye candy.