Dirt Rally 2.0 Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks

Visually, Dirt Rally 2.0 is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game has high draw distances, dense vegetation and stylish reflections, while the cars look detailed too. However, the rest of the graphics no longer look as up to date as Dirt Rally did when it was first released.

This starts with the environmental textures, which often look muddy on closer inspection. Moreover, distant objects look spongy, and lighting effects are not as good as they could be. The cars are engaging to drive though and offer a good blend between arcade and simulation styles. The extensive damage system remains impressive too, but it only partially offsets the game’s graphical shortcomings, in our opinion. The accumulation of dirt on the cars is a nice touch and adds to the realism of the game.

Considering all aspects together, Dirt Rally 2.0’s graphics are only in the upper midfield of modern triple-A games. F1 2018, which Codemasters also developed, sometimes looks much prettier than its rally counterpart despite being slightly older. Correspondingly, we suspect that Dirt Rally 2.0 has been built on a slightly older version of the EGO engine that F1 2018 uses.

However, you could just use one of the predefined presets, which are also listed in the advanced tab. Unlike other games, these presets differ greatly, both in terms of appearance and system requirements. Codemasters has included options for TAA and MSAA anti-aliasing along with up to 16x anisotropic filtering. We set the game to TAA anti-aliasing for our benchmarks, which is less power-hungry than MSAA but still produces an element of blur. It is worth noting that the game looks sharper with AA switched off, but vegetation flickers too strongly for our liking.

Additionally, all graphical changes can be applied without having to restart the game, which is convenient and is something that we would like developers to implement more frequently. It is worth noting that the game lacks notes about what effect each graphics setting has, which is a shame. Dirt Rally 2.0 also needed approximately 44 GB of disk space at the time of our tests.

Unfortunately, Codemasters has not included a dedicated benchmark, so we found a suitable test sequence instead, of which we have included a video below. Our benchmark consists of a time-trial race in Freeplay mode, specifically the Camino a Centenera stage of the Ribadelles rally in Spain. Camino a Centenera is an almost entirely asphalt stage, which eliminates any graphical variances that may occur with dirt or snow stages. We set our test sequence to daytime, cloudy and wet, for reference. We also always chose the Mini Cooper S and left the camera angle pointing at behind the car.