by Rob Williams on February 2, 2011 in Graphics & Displays
AMD and NVIDIA released $250 GPUs last week, and both proved to deliver a major punch for modest cash. After testing, we found AMD to have a slight edge in overall performance, so to see if things change when OCing is brought into the picture, we pushed both cards hard, and then pit the results against our usual suite.
It’s not that often that faithful PC gamers get a proper racing game for their platform of choice, but Dirt 2 is one of those. While it is a “console port”, there’s virtually nothing in the game that will make that point stand out. The game as a whole takes good advantage of our PC’s hardware, and it’s as challenging as it is good-looking.
Manual Run-through: The race we chose to use in Dirt 2 is the first one available in the game, as it’s easily accessible and features a lot of GPU-pounding effects that the game has become known for, such as realistic dust and water effects, a large on-looking crowd of people and fine details on and off the track. Each run-through lasts the entire two laps, which comes out to about 2.5 minutes.
The results seen here scale identically to the results from the non-overclocked versions of these cards. NVIDIA’s GTX 560 Ti keeps ahead of AMD’s HD 6950 1GB at 1680×1050 and 1920×1080, but the tables turn at 2560×1600. With AMD’s overclock, the card reaches the same performance as the HD 6970, while NVIDIA stays a bit behind the GTX 570.