NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 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.

A big goal of NVIDIA’s in creating the GTX 550 Ti was to beat out AMD’s Radeon HD 5770, and thus far, it looks like that’s been accomplished. An exception is seen at 2560×1600, but let me assure you… you do not want to be using either card for that resolution. 1080p is another matter, but anything higher isn’t much fun at all.