Paradigm SHIFT: MainGear's Unique Gaming Rig Tested

Name: Paradigm SHIFT: MainGear's Unique Gaming Rig Tested - Page 10
Brand: Paradigm

by Joel Hruska — Thursday, May 20, 2010, 01:00 PM EDT

DiRT 2

Dirt 2

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Dirt 2

Dirt 2 is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. Codemasters delayed the PC version of Dirt 2 so that they could enhance their Ego engine with DirectX 11 effects. The engine displays certain bleeding-edge rendering technologies like hardware-driven tessellation, which is used for a more detailed audience, tessellated clot as well as a more realistic water that has lifelike ripples, waves and splash effects. DX11 also affords the game more impressive post-rendering motion blur, filtered soft shadows and lighting effects. Dirt 2 is also a solid benchmark for multi-core processors since DX11 is designed to take advantage of multi-threaded system architectures.

The game files directory for DiRT 2 contains information on how to construct and command the game to perform a custom benchmark series. We ordered the game to test a race at Battersea with eight other cars on the track. The benchmark guide notes that running tests with other cars could result in slight performance variability, so we looped our test sequence a number of times, cranked every single detail option up as high as it could go, and recorded the results.

Origin Genesis: 1 or 2 x Radeon HD 5970, Maingear Shift: 2 x GeForce GTX 480

DiRT 2 gives the Shift's pair of GTX 480's a solid start; NVIDIA's high-end Fermi compares well against ATI's HD 5970 in terms of price/performance ratio. All three video card configurations handled the game with ease, even with detail levels set full.