DiRT: Showdown

Racing to the front of our benchmark suite is our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + 4x MSAA + Adv. Lighting

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + 4xMSAA

DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

DiRT’s advanced lighting engine isn’t really within reach of all of these sub-$200 cards, but once we drop down to standard lighting there’s performance to spare, even with MSAA. Though even without that advanced lighting though this is one of the harder games for the GTX 650 Ti Boost; it falls behind the 7790 by about 5%, never mind the 7850.

The Test Total War: Shogun 2
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  • Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    More realistically, price the GTX660 at MOST 180. I can find 7850's for 160, from XFX no less.

    Anandtech, please add an "edit" function to you comments. Also, I want an email when someone responds to me. Then to be able to click a link that takes me directly to that comment, instead of having to plow through 100's of comments.
  • CiccioB - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    nvidia prices its solutions at the price it think they are best. If GTX660 sells like cookies, why on earth should they lower the price? To have a red quarter like AMD?
    And possibly they have quite a few GK106 with just some shaders dead but the memory controller completely working. So those pieces would have to be sold at GTX650 Ti price. With this move they can sell them with a bit of premium price.
    Consider that for nvidia this new board costed zero, while AMD had to forge a new chip, which has a cost.
  • Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    It'd be nice to Just Cause 2 in your benchmarks. It has a built in benchmark and everything. Awesome game people will be playing for years, considering they added multi-player. I know you're still working on the benchmark suite, so this is a suggestion I'd really like to see.
  • Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    nice to see*

    Holy Batman do you guys need to add an edit function to your comments.
  • aTonyAtlaw - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    I would posit that perhaps you need to proofread your comments more than Anandtech needs to provide an edit function.
  • skiboysteve - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    its good to keep in mind that open air coolers can be very loud if you dont have a well ventilated case like me. I have a 6850 with an open air cooler and the thing is VERY loud because it gets so crazy hot inside my case. If I had a blower on it, it wouldn't be nearly as loud
  • marc1000 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    where is Starcraft II ? it's no longer part of the test suite?
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    Yes, it was removed. It gets rather silly on high-end cards these days, which is what we base our benchmark selections on.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    How about Skyrim with the high resolution textures? I've heard that that requires 2 GB to run decently. That would be nice to see tested when the silly 1 GB card is released.
  • warezme - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link

    I think it would be interesting to also post mobile GPU numbers along with these cards. In this field of models there is some relevance related to how the two types would perform in similar games as a comparison.

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