Tech

DiRT 2 - One reason to buy a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card

Looking for a reason to buy a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card? Well, here's one, in the form of DiRT 2.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor Dec. 1, 2009 at 1:53 a.m. PT

Looking for a reason to buy a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card? Well, here's one, in the form of DiRT 2.

AMD has the info (since all currentkly available DirectX 11 GPUs are AMD/ATI GPUs):

AMD announced today that the Games for Windows Live Edition of DiRT 2 is now shipping and marks the first racing game developed from the ground up to take advantage of advanced graphics features available with Microsoft DirectX® 11 and the incredible new ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology for the most engaging gaming experience yet. With a wealth of image quality and performance enhancements supported only on new Direct X 11-capable ATI Radeon graphics cards, DiRT 2, the thrilling sequel to the award-winning Codemasters off-road racer, offers players a more realistic, immersive and exhilarating experience than ever before, and is the latest example of the benefits of AMD’s close working relationship with today’s leading game developers.

What does DirectX 11 offer? Well, here are the improvements compared to DirectX 9:

Improved water effects including more realistic ripples, accurate reflections, and life-like splashes and wakes, more detailed, animated crowd models to cheer on your race, and smoother, more realistically flowing flags and cloth as a result of hardware tessellation where more polygons are generating the scene without degrading game performance.
More accurate simulation of light and shadows as a result of Compute Shader 5.0 found in DirectX 11, allowing for complex computations without major hits on frame rates.
Truer depiction of high dynamic range lighting at twice the color depth of the DirectX 9 version, with special effects rendered at the full screen resolution, up to four times the resolution of the DirectX 9 version.

So, if you want DirectX 11 goodness, what do you want? Well, first off a DirectX 11-compatible GPU, currently available only from AMD.