VGA performance: Colin McRae DiRT 2 (DX11)

Colin McRae Dirt 2

It was merely a couple of months ago 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 were 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 takes advantage of DirectX 11 features to add some more realism to the racing environment. You'll notice an improved appearance 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:

• 8x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

Now should you browse back and forth in articles, for Dirt 2 we recently had to ditch all results and started from scratch all over again. For the aficionado's, this is the Baja level with Baha_Iron trail, eight cars and the trial is at night time so we have nice visible volumetric smoke and lighting. The new time demo is in fact a little harder on the GPU then our previous one. Gorgeous to see really. Anyway, excellent performance for the 5850.

And here an overview of some more cards, all at 19x12 - DX11 - 8xAA - 16xAF and the very best settings. Few results for this DX11 test, more card will be added in the future.