NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

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 the price difference between the GTX 580 and GTX 570 is $150, it’s nice to see the latter perform so well here. At the same time, we saw some considerable jumps in performance compared to the GTX 470.

All of the cards we test with can handle the game at 2560×1600 with playable framerates, and most of those can handle it with max-out detail settings. So it’s no surprise that the GTX 570 becomes another one of those. It looks like it might be soon time to replace this racing game with another, one that’s a bit more demanding.