One of the most anticipated game launches of the year have somewhat unexpectedly become the racing game DiRT 2. Even if it is, by all means, a very capable game it is not the gaming experience that has transformed Codemasters’ latest creation into such a media darling. It’s the fact that the PC version of the game will ship with full DirectX 11 support, which means some advanced and eye pleasing effects with a game that looked good even without DirectX 11.
The majority of the consumers that have acquired a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card this fall have been waiting for this date. Not just to make use of the DirectX 11 support, something AMD’s HD 5000 series is still the sole supporter of, but also since many Radeon HD 5800 cards have shipped with a coupon for a free DirectX 11 version of DiRT 2.
This is what AMD had to say about the game and what to expect in form of graphical effects compared to plain DirectX 9 version:
- Improved water effects including more realistic ripples, accurate reflections, and life-like splashes and wakes, more detailed, animated crowd models to cheer on your race, and smoother, more realistically flowing flags and cloth as a result of hardware tessellation where more polygons are generating the scene without degrading game performance.
- More accurate simulation of light and shadows as a result of Compute Shader 5.0 found in DirectX 11, allowing for complex computations without major hits on frame rates.
- Truer depiction of high dynamic range lighting at twice the color depth of the DirectX® 9 version, with special effects rendered at the full screen resolution, up to four times the resolution of the DirectX® 9 version.
More information can be found at Codemasters’ official DiRT 2 site.
