18 Months Later: Origin's Genesis Desktop Revisited
Far Cry 2, DiRT 2, F1 2010
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Like the original, FarCry 2 was one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC when it arrived. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using the built-in Ranch (Short) demo. |
The dual Radeon HD 5970s lag the twin GTX 580s by ~ 14 percent, but everything here is playable, even with eye candy set to full.
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Dirt 2 is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. Codemasters delayed the PC version of Dirt 2 so that they could enhance their Ego engine with DirectX 11 effects. The engine displays certain bleeding-edge rendering technologies like hardware-driven tessellation, which is used for a more detailed audience, tessellated clot as well as a more realistic water that has lifelike ripples, waves and splash effects. DX11 also affords the game more impressive post-rendering motion blur, filtered soft shadows and lighting effects. Dirt 2 is also a solid benchmark for multi-core processors since DX11 is designed to take advantage of multi-threaded system architectures. |
The game files directory for DiRT 2 contains information on how to construct and command the game to perform a custom benchmark series. We ordered the game to test a race at Battersea with eight other cars on the track. The benchmark guide notes that running tests with other cars could result in slight performance variability, so we looped our test sequence a number of times, cranked every single detail option up as high as it could go, and recorded the results.
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Though Codemasters still continues to torture us with their ridiculously complicated labyrinth of game menus, we’ve found ourselves coming back to one of their titles for a taste of bleeding-edge DX11 benchmarking. F1 2010 is their latest racing simulation and like Dirt 2, it sports impressive visuals with DX11 support. “Ultra” settings for shadow effects and post processing elements like depth of field then become available to the gamer and in turn, crank up the workload on the graphics subsystem. The game engine also makes use of multi-core processors for higher performance on top-end systems. |
