DiRT: Showdown

Racing to the front of our benchmark suite 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.

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + 4x MSAA + Adv. Lighting

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + 4xMSAA

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

DiRT’s advanced lighting engine isn’t really within reach of all of these sub-$200 cards, but once we drop down to standard lighting there’s performance to spare, even with MSAA. Though even without that advanced lighting though this is one of the harder games for the GTX 650 Ti Boost; it falls behind the 7790 by about 5%, never mind the 7850.

The Test Total War: Shogun 2
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  • trajan2448 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link

    Seems a little disingenuous to avoid comparisons to its direct competitor, the7790, which it handily beats and has better frame delivery times. It wasn't designed to go against the 7850, and you guys know that.
  • FearfulSPARTAN - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link

    Nvidia seems to thinks so, cant remember the article but Nvidia said the gtx 650 ti boost beat the 7850 in several games, all of them just so happen to be nvidia optimized games though.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link

    At $169 for the model we reviewed it sure is. It's the $149 1GB card that we need to look at if we want to make meaningful 7790 comparisons.
  • marees - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link

    "the best card is going to be the card you can afford."

    The above conclusion should be revised as "the best card is going to be the card+power_supply+cooling_solution you can afford."

    I would like a gddr5 card <=$200 which can play latest games at 1080p at the max settings allowed by budget. But I dont want to screw-up my entire pc due to wrong choice of Power Supply or Cooling system/case.

    I am sure this has been discussed somewhere before, if not can Anand and his team create a bench / post article to analyse the playable settings of different gddr5 cards along with the additional investment required in terms of case & power supply, esp from a budget gamer point of view - a person for whom it is nice to be able to game, but actually uses the pc mostly for browsing facebook and doing office work.
  • rbfowler9lfc - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link

    Why "Ti Boost"? GTX 660, 660Ti, 650, 650Ti and now 650TiB. So many suffixes, that's confusing for the average joe! Why not just plain GTX 655?!?
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 - link

    Agreed - this is totally ridiculous!

    They've already got up to 3 letters for prefixes (but always use the same GTX on any card half-interesting for actual 3D work), 100 different numbers in each generation, now an additional suffix "Ti". Yet that's still not enough, we need another suffix...

    Based on performance these should be:
    GT640 - GT640
    GTX650 - GTX640
    GTX650Ti - GTX650
    GTX650Ti Boost - GTX655
  • Darbyothrill - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link

    This may very understandably not be a big consideration for many people, but this card appeals to me a great deal as I am interested in running a Steam Linux Box, and the AMD drivers are currently in an atrocious state for linux. I overall think the AMD cards are more compelling for the price right now, but this is a decently priced nVidia solution.
  • vaibhav81 - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link

    guys,I am going to build custom gaming pc. And I Have selected this card for my pc.Can you suggest me other compatible hardware requirement for this,e.g.MotherBoard,PSU,Processor,Case,monitor??
    lower price will be good.

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