DIRT 2

Codemasters’ 2009 off-road racing game continues its reign as the token racer in our benchmark suite. As the first DX11 racer, DiRT 2 makes pretty thorough use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities, not to mention still being the best looking racer we have ever seen.

We’re once more looking at a game that generally favors NVIDIA cards, so there are not a lot of surprises to find in our results. The GTX 560 enjoys a 15% lead over the 6950 1GB at 1920, and it even enjoys a small lead over the 6970. As far as NVIDIA’s cards are concerned we’re looking at a typical 30% advantage over the GTX 460 1GB, and interestingly enough even the GTX 470 is nearly 10fps behind at 1920 resolution.

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  • auhgnist - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    1920x1080 graph is wrong, should be mistakenly used that of 2560x1600
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Fixed. Thanks.
  • Marlin1975 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    6950 1gig look good.

    I am guessing the 560 will either drop in price very quickly or the 6950 will sell better.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Not impressive at alla the 560, 6950 1GB is a good value over the 2GB 6950. I think if you just prefer 1GB 6870 offers more bang for buck.
  • cactusdog - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Wow, plenty of good options from AMD and Nvidia. Since the introduction of eyefinity and 3D surround, we dont need to spend a fortune to play the latest games. For most users with 1 monitor a $250 dollar card gives excellent performance.
  • tech6 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Like top end desktop CPUs, the high end GPU really seems to be increasingly irrelevant for most gamers as the mid-range provides plenty of performance for a fraction of the cost.
  • Nimiz99 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    I was just curious about the 2.8 FPS on Crysis by the Radeon HD 5970 - is that reproducible/consistent?
    I am just curious, b/c on the first graph of average frame-rate it leads the pack; if it fluctuates that badly I would definitely like a little bit more background on it.

    'Preciate the response,
    Nimiz
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    No, it's highly variable. With only 1GB of effective VRAM, the Radeon cards are forced to texture swap - the minimum framerate is chaotic at best and generally marks how long the worst texture swap took. With swapping under the control of AMD's drivers, the resulting minimum framerate ends up being quite variable.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Can somebody explain why 1GB is not enough when 1GB is enough memory to store over 160 frames at 24 bits at 1920x1080. At 60fps, 1GB should be able to supply a constant uncompressed stream of frames for almost 3 whole seconds. Seems like more than enough memory to me. Sounds like somebody is just haphazardly wasting vast amounts of space for no reason at all. Sort of like windows with its WinSXS folder. Lets just waste a bunch of space because we can!
  • ciukacz - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    are you streaming your benchmark video through youtube ?
    because i am rendering mine realtime, which requires loading all the textures, geometry etc.

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