AMD Radeon HD 6870 & HD 6850

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.

As was to be expected, the HD 6870 doesn’t quite compare to the HD 5870, but it doesn’t fall too far behind. Compared to NVIDIA’s GTX 470 and GTX 460, AMD’s latest cards perform exceptionally well in this title, but it should be stressed that Dirt 2 has always favored Radeons a bit more than GeForces, so in the end, the results aren’t all too surprising.

Dirt 2 might have come out last fall, but the game is still mighty good-looking, and thankfully for gamers, pretty well any recent PC configuration you have will allow you to play the game at high detail levels, even with anti-aliasing. In the case of AMD’s latest cards, 2560×1600, “Ultra” and 4xAA is no problem at all.