Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

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.

Benchmark Results: In Dirt Showdown we found the Sapphire HD 7970 Vapor-X was again at the top of the chart along with 114FPS at 1920×1080 with the image quality settings set fairly high. We didn’t test with advanced lighting or global illumination enabled, but to be honest it makes the game look way too fake and we like it better disabled anyway. So far the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680 are tied at two wins each, so this is this getting interesting!