VGA performance: Colin McRae DiRT 2 (DX11)

Colin McRae Dirt 2

Some months ago, when Codemasters announced that they'd be delaying their hotty upcoming and much anticipated title Colin McRae DiRT 2, 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 of 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.

Here's an excellent example where we apply 8xAA - have DX11 - have all quality settings at the very best and then the 768MB models caves in at 2560x1600 due to frame buffer limitation. See that line plummet down .. that's the lack of frame buffer. Still and I can't say this often enough, if you game up-to 1920x1200 this is just not an issue, again nearly double the performance at 87 FPS. 

And above the different brands and respective ODMs compared directly again.  Very nice performance there but you can see the weird dynamics. The R5830 at 2560x1600 is faster as it has 256MB extra memory per GPU.

Currently there are the most DX11 class cards available on the market today, so there you go. We measure with DX11 tessellation activated and 8xAA by the way.