Setup your monitor first

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Colin McRae Dirt 2

It was merely a couple of months ago when Codemasters announced that they'd be delaying their hotty upcoming and much anticipated title Colin McRea DiRT 2, at that time nobody really understand the dynamic of delaying the PC version -- while Codemasters was already releasing the console version. As it turned out ATI was really keen to see high-profile titles in the Christmas season carrying support for DirectX 11.

Codemasters takes advantage of DirectX 11 features to add some more realism of the racing environment. You'll notice improved appearance of water with the help of displacement mapping and other surfaces as well as complex crowd animations which are tessellated for more rich detail.

Image Quality setting:

• 8x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

We just started using this title and will measure DX11 performance. Currently there are only a couple DX11 class cards available on the market today, so there you go. The 5770 PCS+ will definitely stand ground at a good 43 average frames per second in DX11 mode.

That's downright respectable performance.