Colin McRae DIRT

The Colin McRae series has always been on the edge of technology, pushing graphics cards and CPUs to deliver astonishing graphics, the latest incarnation called DIRT takes racing games to the next level GFX wise. It’s stressful enough to bring high end cards to a grinding halt; we had to drop resolution and in-game detail in order to get playable frame rates. Surprisingly the game remains quite enjoyable even at these low IQ settings.



Our first test is at 800x600 with Low Quality settings:



The stock 7300 GT DDR2 barely manages to keep the game enjoyable, with FPS drops to 17 there is noticeable stuttering. The DDR3 version does much better, delivering playable frame rates at stock, surpassing the 8500 GT. When overclocked all cards offer fluent frame rates, with the 7300 GT DDR3 in the lead with ~8% over the 8500 GT.

The overclocked results were encouraging so we upped the resolution to 1024x768 to see how they’d handle it.



The PNY 7300 GT DDR2 at stock speeds drops out, no playable FPS was obtained, even when overclocked it was hardly enjoyable. Both 7300 GT DDR3/8500 GT have a hard time at stock speeds. Overclocked they do a bit better with average FPS close to 30.

Onto our next game ->