Colin McRae D.I.R.T.
Official website

With D.I.R.T., Codemasters has yet again updated their popular Rally car racing game. This time they've pushed their game past the classic point-to-point rallying by adding extreme off-road action on dirty and muddy tracks, or one could have some fun on gravel circuits. The brand new engine for the new Colin McRae game pushes even the latest video cards down to their knees; can our round-up competitors offer anything worth talking about?

We moved on from testing the demo to the full game, as the final release seems to have gotten a minor performance fix for current generation video cards. We still went through the Avelsbachring racetrack located in Germany, this time we could run the game at an acceptable 30 frames per second at 1600x1200, enjoyable!



During previous benchmarking sessions I noticed how with my preferred image quality settings the game began to play more fluently when using the high-end cards. Theoretically the 9600GT SLI came out as fastest but actually playing the game I noticed the same issue's I had when testing the HD3870X2: micro-stuttering. To me, moving to double GT's felt like I only got one card installed, the 9800GTX is a much better choice here if you want extremely fluent gameplay at the 1600x1200 resolution.


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