AMD Radeon HD 6950 & HD 6970 CrossFireX

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.

Depending on the resolution, CrossFireX can go from being “nice” to “great” to “awesome!”. At 1680×1050, the average FPS on dual HD 6970s compared to the single was +56%, while at 2560×1600, that figure soared up to a much more impressive +77%. This is a trend that’s common with most high-end cards, as lower resolutions are not often able to push a GPU quite so hard. There’s of course a major difference between 1.7 million pixels (1680×1050) and 4.1 million (2560×1600), that’s for sure.