AMD’s Sub-$100 Line-up: Radeon HD 6450, 6570 & 6670 Review

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.

Given that all three of the cards we’re taking a look at today are also the least-expensive on the market, the result above is to be expected. While the HD 6450 had no chance with our given settings at 1680×1050, the other cards remained fully playable. I generally consider 40 FPS to be the borderline for “playable” framerates, but surprisingly the game felt just fine.

Both the HD 6570 and HD 6670 had the brawn to deliver good framerates at our above settings, but the HD 6450 had to have its detail settings dropped down to “Medium”, and also have 0xAA disabled. Considering that the card is $55, being able to play this game at all at 1680×1050 is rather impressive.