GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Review

For so many reasons, the DiRT series is one of the best out there for racing fans. Each game offers outstanding graphics and audio, excellent control and environments that are way too much fun to tear up. Showdown is an interesting beast, as it features destructive racing, but as we discovered in our review, it too is a ton of fun.

Manual Run-through: In our search for the perfect Showdown track to test with, we found that any of the snow levels offered the greatest stress on a GPU. The specific track we chose is the second race in the second tier, taking place in Colorado. We begin our FPS recording as soon as the countdown to the race begins, and end it as soon as we hit the finish line at the end of the three-lap race.

Battlefield 3 requires a fairly beefy system if you want to run the game at max detail at 1080p or higher, but thankfully, the same can’t be said about DiRT: Showdown. The reason I say “thankfully” is that the game, when maxed out, still looks amazing. Here, we averaged to about 53 FPS with the 650 Ti and never dipped below 43 FPS. These were completely playable framerates, so no further tweaking was necessary.