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Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.
This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.
We attempted to use the highest possible settings to get playable frame rates from Dirt 2 and we settled on 1920×1200 with 16AF in DX11 mode with high settings ingame. This ensures that we are using the new DX11 featureset, one of the selling points of this particular board. The GTS 250 is running in DX9 mode at ultra settings – obviously as there is no DX11 support for this card these settings are not identical.
The Dirt 2 experience on the modest HD5750 is very impressive overall, especially considering we are using a high resolution and running in full DX11 mode – the frame rates never dip into the KitGuru danger zone. A portion of the prospective audience wouldn't be gaming at such a high resolution on this card so figures would be higher.
I am in work so I haven’t had time to read the whole review. I did read the conclusion however and it looks disappointing. I read the HARDOCP review also a while ago and it seems you had more success than they did. They actually reported the card running hotter ! perhaps the lack of paste is a factor issue? The cooler is very odd looking, not sure I like it at all.
Just goes to show that even Asus, one of the finest companies on the market can occassionally drop the ball.
Shit ! I have his card ! mine runs quite hot too, im going to take it apart later to see if it is the paste ! thanks !