DiRT 2 steals and eats NFS:Shift's lunch, in front of it

[Caydr]

Perhaps you've noticed a feeling in the pit of your stomach, a kind of yearning that can't be satiated. You try to eat, but it won't go away. Well, I've been away from the forum for a few days with some kind of strange-ass cold/flu/something that completely screwed up my head without making me even slightly nauseas. I mean, I felt like I was freezing to death even though the room was a more-than-comfortable 25c or so, while underneath about 6 layers of blankets. My body temperature was also about 2 degrees below normal and I was sweating. And eating. Oh boy did I eat. But I couldn't sleep.

Just got a Radeon 5850*. $295ish plus tax, but got it in person so I dodged the shipping. Could've saved more by buying it out-of-province but I was spontaneously GPU-horny and...

...Well anyway, I just tried out DiRT 2. This is what Shift should've been. Admittedly I've only played the first race but it was such a superior experience I wanted to immediately follow up on my previous "NFS: Shift blows" thread.

Fun and reasonable physics, good interface, great graphics. The interface IS a little console-ized, but at least it isn't a failabyrinth like NFS:S. DiRT 2 strongly reminds me of previous Need for Speed games - you know, the good ones: Hot Pursuit, Most Wanted, etc. Rather than do the (now obligatory) half-decade NFS genre jump, EA should've just spun the game off as a separate franchise and kept NFS as what it was always meant to be: a game where you can do mid-air flips into an exploding gas station and fly out the other side, winning the race.

*In case you'd be interested to hear my thoughts on the Radeon 5850: It's a very nice card. I happened to get the MSI version, and I really have to hand it to MSI, they are the very first board manufacturer in the history of computers to make software that actually enhances one's opinion of the product they just bought.

Instead of the usual shovelware/adware/bullshit you'd expect, MSI has teamed up with Guru3D to produce a user-oriented version of RivaTuner with all the functions that 99% of people want, without all the functions the final 1% will just download RivaTuner for anyway. It handles manual fan speed ramping, overclocking, overvolting (up to 1.35v, stock is 1.08v), hardware monitoring, and on-screen display. All of the above can be disabled if you don't want that functionality.

The best overclock I've been able to get in the 24 hours I've had is 820/1200 @ 1.1v. I could boost things a fair bit higher but honestly right now I'm more than satisfied with having the board run as cool and quiet as possible: 56c with the fan running at 20% so that it's virtually silent. Also, the VRAM on the 5xxx series is a kind of quasi-ECC. If you push it too hard and it starts detecting errors, it slows itself down automatically. It can be difficult to say for sure where the highest you can set it is without performance becoming unsteady under certain loads.

So far I appear to be getting about a 40-50% speed increase versus my previouscard, an overclocked Radeon 4890 @ 910/1100 (stock 850/975) with similar settings in the games I've tried.