Colin McRae: Dirt 2

Publisher: Codemasters

From our Colin McRae: Dirt 2 review:
“While Dirt 2’s shift away from ‘pure’ rallying to a more contemporary styling will likely divide players, there’s no arguing that the game itself looks simply stunning, improving upon Race Driver: GRID’s EGO engine to make Dirt 2 one of the best looking racers we’ve ever seen. Both cars and tracksides are lavishly detailed, and there are dozens of gorgeous touches, from the spattering mud in jungle stages, to the jaw dropping water effects from the driver’s cam when you hit a water hazard.”

We drive a lap around the London, Battersea track, with a full eight-car grid, starting at the back. We use the maximum image quality settings in DX11 mode. We repeat each test three times, discarding anomalous results and averaging the consistent ones.


Note that Dirt 2 does not support single core CPUs. The game refuses to even run when using just one, hence, the lack of result!

CPU usage in-game

Dirt 2 has proved quirky. Three and five core CPUs see performance drops using an ATI card and five core only with Nvidia. This could be because most computer systems work in a base-2 environment where everything is even, so the Dirt 2 engine might just not quite know how to use an odd number efficiently as the engine scales pretty well.

Although, saying that, we count three cores at 40-50 per cent load, and three more between 10-30 per cent when we look at the load graphs. Either way, a dual-core CPU is "enough" to yield a comparable performance.