NVIDIA casts doubt on DiRT: Showdown's benchmark

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
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Seems to be a pissing match between AMD and NVIDIA on DiRT: Showdown that I didn't manage to catch. We just received this e-mail from AMD:

"Recently, AMD was made aware of incorrect statements pertaining to DiRT Showdown, a Gaming Evolved partner title, by NVIDIA. Apparently our competitor is claiming that Codemasters has stated that they are not fully behind the great work they did on DiRT Showdown and the accompanying benchmark. Today, Gary Rowe, VP of Digital Business at Codemasters, set the record straight. Gary wrote:

We stand by the performance results from the current version of the Dirt Showdown Benchmark. As always we continue to work on optimisation of performance for all hardware.”

As many of you know, DiRT Showdown performs significantly better on AMD graphics hardware. This is largely because of the adoption of Forward + and Global Illumination techniques, both of which rely heavily on the DirectCompute capabilities of the GPU and harness the raw compute power offered by our GCN Architecture.

AMD, via our Gaming Evolved program, will continue to collaborate with software developers to develop cutting-edge technologies and integrate them into the latest games as you have seen with DiRT Showdown and will continue to see in future AMD Gaming Evolved partner title releases.
"

We do use DiRT: Showdown as a benchmark, but we don't use the built-in benchmark (we do manual runs), but even in our regular tests, AMD does pull ahead of NVIDIA fairly significantly. Sometimes it's a vice versa though, so I am not sure if NVIDIA is just trying to cast doubt on a game AMD sponsors or what. AMD could just as easily make a similar argument in a few weeks about Borderlands 2, which NVIDIA is heavily supporting.

Can't we just get along?
 
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