Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 FleX 1GB

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.

As is to be expected with a reference-clocked card, Sapphire’s FleX performed on par with an actual reference sample. Overall, the performance in Dirt 2 is great at all resolutions, even with anti-aliasing enabled.

While the game did play decently well at 2560×1600 with 4xAA, it’s not going to be desirable by most gamers. Lowering the detail levels to Medium helped the performance significantly, and of course, at any resolutions below 2560×1600, you’re golden with maxed-out detail levels.

Dirt 2 @ 4800×900: Medium Detail, 4xAA	Min: 29 / Avg: 51.304 FPS

Dirt 2 was one of the first titles to be released with AMD’s Eyefinity Certified classification, and for good reason. The game looks fantastic across three displays, and because it’s certified, the GUI is appropriately displayed. Because 4800×900 has a mere ~5.5% more pixels than 2560×1600, it’s no surprise to see the exact same detail settings used – which as the screenshot proves, looks quite good.