NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

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.

Because Dirt 2 typically favors Radeon cards more than GeForces, these results are about what I expected, but I’m a little surprised that the GTX 580 kept up quite this well. It even performs favorably to our CrossFireX setups, although when pricing is involved, the $360 it costs for two HD 6850’s does seem a little more desirable.

Dirt 2 might still be a great-looking game, but it happens to work well on a variety of GPUs at topped-out settings, and the GTX 580 of course is no different.