AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: 7990 Gets Official

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 is something of a divisive game for benchmarking. The game’s advanced lighting system, while not developed by AMD, does implement a lot of the key concepts they popularized with their Leo forward lighting tech demo. As a result performance with that lighting system turned on has been known to greatly favor AMD cards, which is exactly what’s going on here. But since we’re looking at high-end cards there’s little reason not to be testing with it turned on since even a lone GTX 680 can push 30fps with 5760 with these advanced effects turned on.

In any case, 7990 completely clobbers everything else here short of the 7970GE CF. As heavy as the load is from turning these advanced effects on, the 7990 is still more than fast enough to crack 60fps even at 5760.