IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 05/12/2009

Elite Bastards review: Colin McRae DiRT 2 (PC)

It's been a longer wait than some might have wished for, but today finally sees the UK release of Colin McRae: DiRT 2 for the PC, complete with a new DirectX 11 capable iteration of Codemasters "Ego" engine.آ We put the game through its paces to see if it's as fun as throwing a car around muddy tracks rightfully should be, while also briefly checking out the game's DirectX 11 performance numbers to see how things shape up on AMD's Radeon HD 5800 series hardware.

If it's been a while since you touched a game like this, there's certainly something of a learning curve initially to readjust to the skills required to compete in your average DiRT 2 race, but once it all comes flooding back to you you'll soon find yourself enjoying the almost balletic juggling of brake and accelerator required to safely but quickly traverse each circuit.آ The track layouts themselves are certainly designed to get the adrenaline pumping - Quite brilliantly so at times, as you find yourself hanging mere inches from a sheer cliff face at times in the name of shaving a few fractions of a second of your lap time or to sneak past an opponent, and taking the word "dangerous" into a whole new league way beyond simply hitting a tree or wall on your way around the track.آ Once you get into some of the faster cars and find yourself faced with narrow, rock-lined tracks with huge drops around every other corner, nobody will blame you for finishing a race with sweating palms and dilated pupils, such is the wonderful recreation of high speed that this game offers.

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 (PC) review

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SiSoft Sandra 2010 includes OpenCL benchmarks

If you're looking for a way to test the OpenCL performance of your system, then the latest version of SiSoft's Sandra application might have just what you need, as its 2010 revision ships with a couple of basic OpenCL benchmarks, ported from the NVIDIA CUDA and AMD Stream tests available in some previous versions of the application.

The SiSoftware OpenCL Benchmarks look at the two major performance aspects:

- Computational performance: in simple terms how fast it can crunch numbers. It follows the same style as the CPU Multi-Media benchmark using fractal generation as its workload. This allows the user to see the power of the GPGPU in solving a workload thus far exclusively performed on a CPU.

- Memory performance: this analyses how fast data can be transferred to and from the GPGPU. No matter how fast the processing, ultimately the end result will be affected by memory performance.

SiSoft's full press release about this product can be found right here, or you can download the free "Lite" version of SiSoft Sandra 2010 from here.

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