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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 enabled maximum settings, including hardware tessellated animated crowds and dynamic water via ULTRA settings.
Dirt 2 is one of our favourite racing games and changing from a single card to Crossfire X means that this game is now fully playable. In single card mode the engine juddered on specific tracks which ruined the immersiveness of the overall experience.
The extra rendering horsepower really helps to not only increase the framerate but to smooth it out in specific situations. This is a great result for the CFX configuration and shows benefits by adding another card to your system.
That really is bloody impressive. I am so tempted to sell my noisy 5850 and go for two of these and see if I can make my gaming system silent.
Those frame rates are really excellent, nice to see Bad Company 2 in the mix for a change, I love that game.
No noise, and gaming on a 24 inch screen. I am quite sure I am thinking like many people now and wondering if my noisy home brewed PC is worth it. I might contemplate looking at somethign similar as the test rig in this. that AMD 1055T looks to be wicked good.
What a brilliant idea for a review. Instead of a 480 GTX fermi card, we can have two of these, it handles games at 1920×1200 perfectly, without noise, while consuming 1/5 of the power, even in Crossfire X. AMD drop the ball when they don’t promote this right. Hope Sapphire sell some major cards out of this.
Great article KitGuru, thanks. I love the idea of silence. its been a while since I can remember having a quiet pc. I am so tempted to do something along the lines of the article and just start again. I hate the whirring all the time.
As hard as I tried, its impossible to fault a PC like this.
overclocked 1055T without voltage increases. Silent CPU cooler.
Two graphics cards with no noise, low power drain which consume little power yet its all capable of handling 24 inch screen resolutions. Me want !
My colleague in work built a system around a zalman silent chassis which has no fans and basically acts like a giant heatsink. his gaming sucked, but that was last year. I think two of these in a similar system would be very very impressive. No noise at all and killer gaming. ATI might release silent solutions next time themselves, or perhaps they work with partners such as Sapphire anyway for future releases?
Love the review concept and I havent seen this anywhere else. One card isnt enough for me, as I love Battlefield Bad Company 2. But these in Crossfire X, has enough horsepower. Now to sell my system :p
I have to take my hat off to KitGuru for attempting at times to do real world reviews for Joe Public (aka me). I love reading about GTX480’s running with 980X’ processors at 4.5GHZ but its such a small audience and pointless for most of us.
It also leads me into another point, a 30 inch screen. Most of those cards and systems are only worth the money if you have a 30 inch screen and want to game at 2560×1600. How many people own a 30 inch screen? id say less that one third of a percent, if even. Basically all the 2560 tests are useless for anyone to see.
This leads me into this review. an easily overclocked yet very affordable 1055T Cpu from AMD. a good but affordable motherboard, with a quiet cooler and two reasonably priced graphics cards, which again dont take much power and make no noise.
This goes for my vote as system of the year.
Fab review, what a lovely little rig that is. desceptively powerful 🙂
Graphics cards like this are sexier to me than a noisy power sucking beast.
Wait, I just described the GTX480 !
Very good review and what a great Crossfire configuration.
My only question is, do the Catalyst drivers still suck? 🙂
nVidia still need to play catchup with the 5 series, especially now as the partners are releasing such brilliant cards like this.
Great idea, and I enjoyed reading that one. have no funds to buy a new system, but I like the concept idea. I think a lot of people would like a silent PC, or as close to silent as possible. these seem a very strong option, and at £100 each, very well priced.
@ Gareth Cringle – no, catalyst drivers have been very good for many months, many of the big games have or get Crossfire profiles very quickly. ITs not like it was in 2008.
I thought that was a very good review and I liked the testing and the information, which is useful to know. it seems quite close to a single HD5850 in performance. Very good in other words.
The only issue i have is that Catalyst drivers can be SLOW to get Crossfire profiles, so you could well be running a new game in single card mode until ATI got a new driver out.
Thats the only aspect of this configuration im not sold on.
It is a point worth making Terry, but I think ATi are much faster now, big A list titles anyway. maybe some of the lesser games people like might get a slower update. I haven’t got a Crossfire system so I dont know mind you.
I think its great to see AMD cpu’s being used more, that 1055T is brilliant and it certainly shows in Grand Theft Auto 4 its more than up to the task.
Excellent, really enjoyed reading this one.
How did they perform in Crysis Zardon? 🙂
Two 5670’s in Crossfire are around the same performance as a HD5850. give or take a few FPS here and there. They would handle the game ok, but you wouldnt be running at top settings at 1920, not by a long shot.
Brilliant review and covered what I need to know. I am going now to order two of these. thanks for the review.
Very good article and I think these cards are very nice. Together they are really good for gaming, on their own more for media. I like the design, the cooler is attractive.
Nice to see Battlefield results, very few sites test that game and its all I play. good performance. better than my 5770. and quieter 🙁
Damn. this is making my GTX 270 purchase on ebay look crap. Wouldnt have cost me much more either. Buy one, get another later………… wonder how many people do that?
I always find something wrong with graphics card reviews. cards are too loud, too hot, or just overpriced.
These seem pretty much perfect really dont they? Maybe £80 each? id buy those. would be around same price as 5770 but faster!
Shit I cant believe how popular these cards are going on the comments. everyone seems to love them. never seen that before with a review. ive been trying to find flaws with the design. they dont even need a good PSU as they dont take any power connectors.
Id like to see Crysis at gamer settings, although you covered most of the main engines,.
Very good review Zardon. I like the product, its weird though. I wonder what a silent PC sounds like :p My PC is a mess of noise. drives me nuts
I cant find these anywhere in the UK, anywhere actually selling them?
I dont see them either anywhere. seems pointless if people cant buy them! best cards no one could buy :p
Both of your reviews fail to mention the EyeFinity feature shown on the front of the Sapphire box as included on this card. This is an important feature.
If the review were complete then I’d know if the three outputs on the card were all independant and if the card would drive three monitors simultaneously and I guess I’d also know if you can use the outputs on the second card in the CrossFire to connect to additional monitors and since there are a total of 6 outputs then maybe we can use 6 monitors. But after reading the articles I am having to go to some other site for some other review to get these basic tidbits. In this respect your review has left me wanting.
Don’t assume gamers are the only people buying video cards. A complete review would have covered all the major features of the product before getting into too many gaming results. The EyeFinity is a standard feature on just about every ATI card currently in production so assessment of the EyeFinity feature should be considered as basic for a complete review.
Furthermore this is not a serious gaming card so why treat it as such ? Any serious gamer will look at oh ya, maybe an EyeFinity setup with 3 monitors or better and a 5800 series or better video card. Or maybe a passive Eyefinity system using, say, a pair of 5670’s but we’ll have to wait for the review won’t we.
Why waste so much time game testing when the basics have not even been addressed?
Actually as I think we proved, two of them in Crossfire makes for a silent, yet serious gaming solution. The figures speak for themselves, and feedback has been positive. Sapphire were keen to help promote a Crossfire solution as a good gaming platform with the benefits of having no noise, low power drain and a viable method for a future upgrade.
Your other point is very valid, but unfortunately to test eyefinity you need 6 monitors. Right now we don’t have six panels to test eyefinity correctly. This is the only reason it was omitted. I am glad you got the information you needed on other sites, and we appreciate your time taking writing your feedback.
@ Tweaker. Actually I found the review very useful as it appears so did everyone else. Sounds like you have a bit of an axe to grind. While however you are sounding like such a pompous smug ass, perhaps you could step back and realise that MANY people will find this review useful as it addresses potential upgrade possibilities for those who have one of these cards and find it underpowered for gaming. Silent with gaming potential on a 24 inch screen? Id find that MUCH more useful than a review of six screens which about 0.5 percent of the public can afford in the first place.
its hard to be nice actually reading your post as you sound so bitter, angry and actually quite stupid. Any serious gamer will have 3 monitors? thats bollocks.
Beware the cheerleaders, they can cost you the game.
Your review of the Crossfire did indeed prove this card can run some games better when you use 2 cards. As it should.
Why spend so many review pages on the game testing ? Test the toughest game, use it as a benchmark and your done. Why beat the thing to death with redundant tests ?
Less=more=time to review the features the manufacturer boasts about. A review should cover more than just performance. A good car review includes performance data, economy, testers opinions good and bad, and the value quotient. There must be a Ying and a Yang to be impartial. Part of this equation is missing.
I think you could do with a few cheerleaders to ease the pain Tweaker.
These reviews are very helpful. certain engines run differently on various hardware and drivers so a single game engine report is not enough. Thank god you don’t write reviews! Redundant to you maybe, but to the rest of us? hardly. check the page for comments for example.
Clearly you want specific results on 6 monitors and thats great, maybe you could go out, buy six, test it, link us and we can comment on the single engine you used for game testing (in a crossfire environment which is for games? lol) then take pictures of your six monitors and tell us its great for multitasking, which we already know etc.
Useless feedback.
I’ve been banned ! Truth hurts I guess.
6 monitor review ? Never said that.
If this is a game oriented site then I was mistaken. I was looking for site that does well crafted, comprehensive reviews and allows positive and negative comments. I have been banned for my comments here so it would seem that any criticism will be frowned upon.
You haven’t been banned, everyone was banned this morning for a short while due to configuration issues. You need to relax, take a deep breath and count to ten. Works wonders for the blood pressure.