ATI CATALYST 10.2 & 10.3 Driver Preview – Application Profiles

Colin McRae: DiRT2

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is one of the most anticipated racing games of the year and will take full advantage of DirectX 11, adding realism to the racing environment. The game also will have hardware tessellation that is said to improve the appearance of water and other surfaces, as well as crowd animations. Utilizing the EGO Engine, DiRT 2 should raise the bar for PC gaming and is a definite must-have for PC gamers as it will have cars and tracks twice as detailed as those seen in Race Driver: GRID. All settings were set to high with 8x AA.

Benchmark Results: Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is a game that requires a hefty system to run at these settings. Installing the new Catalyst 10.2/10.3 drivers gave us a solid boost in performance. Not only did I see a gain in FPS at single card performance and Crossfire performance. There was also a boost in the Crossfire Scaling. Using CCC 10.1 Crossfire scaled to x1.63/x1.71(1280×1024/1920×1080), with the CCC 10.2/103 it scaled to x1.74/x1.73. Take into consideration a 15% performance boost in a single card set up and ~21% in crossfire over the previous CCC 10.1 I think ATI did something right with this driver.