DiRT: Showdown

As always, starting off our benchmark collection is our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.

Though NVIDIA’s goal is to surpass the 7950 – something they generally accomplish – in some titles AMD’s parts still hold such an innate advantage as to hold off the GTX 760, and this is one such case. Performance of the GTX 760 trails the 7950 by 18% here, with the GTX 760 falling just short of averaging 60fps at 1920 with advanced lighting. But as we’ve seen with other reviews, this is the only game where AMD holds an advantage quite this great.

It’s interesting to note though that this is also one of the only games the GTX 760 struggles to beat the GTX 660 Ti, owing to the heavy shader load placed on these cards by the advanced lighting system. The two are essentially tied with that lighting turned off, while the GTX 760 takes a small lead with it off.

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  • karasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Your thoughts seem to be a bit... Lacking :) thanks for the review!
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Did the CMS eat the final page again? Everything looks fine on my end.
  • karasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    The final page was missing when I first looked, after about 5 minutes it seemed cleared up :)
  • ilkhan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
    I think you meant "drive" not "driver"
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Indeed. Thank you. Fixed.
  • Guspaz - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    tl;dr: It's a GeForce GTX 670 for $100 less.

    That's not a dig on the article, it's well written, but that does seem to be what I'm reading from all the test results.
  • Atlas T. - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Very informative review. The GTX 760 is undoubtedly a potential buy.

    I wonder if my i5-2310 2.9GHz (locked CPU) would manage to handle this little beast fully overclocked?
  • omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    It should do fine.
  • UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    Even a shit i5 will be fine.
  • Wreckage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    AMD will now have to sell the 7970 for $200 and bundle 12 games with it.

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