This is a video of a Benchmark run done with the demo of the game Dirt 2 on a high-end PC just to see what you can expect to get from the game running with high level of detail… The Benchmark Result is from Intel Core i5 750 @ 3,4 GHz, Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 (DirectX 9), 4GB DDR3 1333 MHz, Windows 7 Professional system running Dirt 2 in 1680×1050 Resolution, Ultra Quality Preset, No Multisampling. The results I got was 68,6 FPS Average (frames per second), which was quite good, and the game remains comfortably playable even with 8x multisampling enabled on the above PC configuration. The benchmark is done in DirectX 9 as the only other available mode in the game is DirectX 11 and currently I do not have an ATI 5xxx series video card that supports DX 11 to test with.

If you want to benchmark your PC you’ll need to download the Demo of the game Colin McRae: Dirt 2 from one of the following locations:
- Gamershell
- Strategy Informer
- Worthdownloading
- Boomtown
- cheap drugs target=”_blank”>ComputerGames.ro
- Gamespot.com
- Fileplay
- 4player.de
- Big Download
- Game Shadow
- Codemasters Torrent

Then you need to install, run the game and configure in the Options menu the Graphics settings. At the bottom of the Graphic Options menu you can find an option to run the Benchmark, and after it finishes you’ll see the results, but this is not the only way to run it. Instead of doing that you can also quit the game after you setup the graphic options and then run the executable with some options to activate only the benchmark mode. In order to do that you need to run “DiRT 2.exe -benchmark example_benchmark.xml“. The file example_benchmark.xml contains some parameters on what to run in the benchmark, but does not contain the game config (you can find that in another xml file if you want to edit it manually instead of going inside the game to change the video settings!). Anyway, creating a shortcut with the following options to run the game in benchmark mode gives great results, but also has one minor drawback – after the benchmark run finishes (about 4 minutes in total) the results are not being displayed. To get the results in the form of average and minimum framerate you’ll need to open the “Documents / My Games / Dirt 2 Demo / benchmarks” folder on your PC and there you’ll find an XML file with a name like “DiRT2_Benchmark_17-34-12_on_02-12-2009.xml” for instance. Open it with a text viewer and inside you’ll find the results from the benchmark you you just finished running.

Anyway no matter what of the two methods you use to run the benchmark you are going to have some different results with each run… different cars for the opponents, different finishing place etc. which makes the benchmark demo closer to the real play of the game, but some of the die hard benchmark fans will say it is not very good for comparison purposes.

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