NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Video Card Review w/ MSI and EVGA

Dirt: Showdown

Dirt: Showdown is a video game published and developed by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It was released in May 2012 in Europe and in June in North America. It is part of the Colin McRae Rally game series.

Dirt: Showdown removes several of the gameplay modes featured Dirt 3, and introduces new ones. Gameplay modes can be classified as Racing, Demolition, Hoonigan or Party. We ran the built in Benchmark at Ultra settings to get a true feel of what this engine has to offer!

It is very important to note that Global Illumination and Advanced Lighting have massive performance penalties when enabled, something not seen in other titles in the Dirt series. It seems to affect NVIDIA hardware more so than AMD. We ran with and without the settings enabled to show our readers that these two settings can make a world of difference to your gaming experience.

Benchmark Results: Both the EVGA GTX 660 SC and the MSI GeForce GTX 660 OC were spot on with each other. The EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC averaged 88.3 frames per second at 1280×1024 and 70.6 frames per second at 1920×1024. The MSI GeForce GTX 660 OC averaged 88.4 fps at 1280×1024 and 70.5 fps at 1920×1080 these performance numbers put our cards within .1 fps of each other. If we compare the GeForce GTX 660 graphics cards to the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC, there was a pretty solid performance difference. At 1280×1024 the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC was nearly 14 frames per second or ~15% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660’s, once we increased the resolution to 1920x 1080 the difference between the GeForce GTX 660’s and the GTX 660 Ti SC closed slightly to 12.4%.