VGA performance: Colin McRae DiRT 2 (DX11)
Colin McRae Dirt 2
It was merely a couple of months prior to release when Codemasters announced that they'd be delaying their hotly upcoming and much anticipated title Colin McRae DiRT 2, at that time nobody really understood the dynamic of delaying the PC version -- while Codemasters was already releasing the console version. As it turned out, ATI was really keen to see high-profile titles in the Christmas season carrying support for DirectX 11.
Codemasters took advantage of DirectX 11 features to add some more realism to the racing environment. You'll notice an improved representation of water with the help of displacement mapping and other surfaces, as well as complex crowd animations which are tessellated for richer detail.
Image Quality setting:
- Baja Iron Route 1
- 8x Anti-Aliasing
- 16x Anisotropic Filtering
- All settings maxed out
Pretty nice performance considering our stringent image quality settings. The game looks incredible this way. With 8xAA the 768MB models cave in due to frame buffer limitation. But with ~200 USD cards we doubt you play your games at that resolution anyway. If so, a quick fix is to lower AA to 4x.
And above, the several brands and respective SKUs compared directly again. Very nice performance there but let's put the results into a performance cart with competing cards.
Currently the chart shows most DX11 class cards available on the market today, so there you go. We measure with DX11 tessellation activated and 8xAA by the way. Dirt 2 really is an ATI title, the GTX 460 is head to head with the 5830. The 1024MB models and the fastest clocked SKUs however break free of the 5830. But again, this is an ATI title.
