XFX HD5870 Black Edition Review

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.

The HD5870 has been well optimised for Dirt 2 on a driver level and it shows by the extremely small differential between average and minimum frame rates. Both cards make this a wonderful gaming experience and the Black Edition obviously pushes the performance a little higher.

It would be fair to say that playing Colin McRae Dirt 2 on the XFX Black Edition is about as good an experience at it can get. The game is buttery smooth throughout and thanks to the refined Catalyst Drivers the overall Image Quality is second to none.

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