GeForce GTS 450 review roundup - 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 8x AA the GTS 450 cards cave in after 19x12 due to shader processor limitations. Still, this is nice value for money.

And above, the several brands and respective SKUs compared directly again. Very decent performance there but let's put the results into a performance chart with competing cards.

Currently the chart shows most DX11 class cards available on the market today, so there you go. We measured with DX11 tessellation activated and 8x AA. Now, it just hit me that I still need to re-do the R5750 results, but ATI has the upper hand here.