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Dirt 5 is out this Friday, and while I don’t recall playing any of the rest of this series, I did recently try the original Dirt Rally on Xbox Game Pass, but didn’t get into it because it was the more analytical side of rally driving, such as putting your car together etc, whereas this one certainly has more of an arcade experience, and that’s what draws me in.
As you’d expect, there’s oodles of tracks on which to drive down. At this point, I haven’t driven down anywhere near like them all, for reasons I’ll get into, and that’s partly because while there’s 10 locations, there’s over 70 unique routes, but within a few races, you get an idea of the way things are going… and slowly, was the way.
Dirt 5 has minimum specs (looking at the Intel side, for me) of a Core i3 2130, and a max of Core i5 9600K. I have an i7 5920k, so that’s better than both; memory is 8GB min, and 16GB max. I have 16GB. When it comes to the graphics card, I use nVidia and it’s a GTX970 minimum, and GTX1070Ti maximum. I have a GTX980, so that’s somewhere inbetween. I’m planning to buy a new PC soon, and was thinking about one with a RTX3080 card, but then having seen what AMD are coming out with, I’m going to wait a little while until those are out, the comparison reviews are out, and I can make an informed choice as to what to get.
Given the way the supply chain went with nVidia’s cards, and if the same happens with AMD’s, I can see it being the New Year before I actually take the plunge.
However, in the meantime, I started off with ultra high settings, and boy did my system struggle – as the video below shows, along with another where the game crashes back to desktop, even with lower settings!
In fact, made my PC slow down and lag behind in other ways for a while. For example, I wanted to change the volume between playing through the speakers and playing through my headphones, but it wouldn’t let me do that. Similarly, I could bring up nVidia Shadowplay in order to record gaming footage, but when I went to actually click anything, it didn’t work. In the end I quit out of the game, and when I clicked on the desktop with my left mouse button, it acted like I was clicking on it with the right, and as if I wanted to change settings! Huh?!
A minute or so later, things were back to normal, and I could send the sound through my headphones. However, even just sat on the game’s menu after that, I could hear the fan in my PC going very fast.
Hence, it’s not a surprise that when I ran the Benchmark, it gave a 26.6fps average.
As I play Dirt 5, it has not yet been released, so I have stopped and will wait for a day one patch, and then try again. Pretty much every major game has a day one patch these days.
A couple of comments on my gameplay of this have been:
- Drakhas: “I’ve been having this problem too. It’ll just randomly crash. I’ve messed with all of my graphics settings and forced 60fps vsync with the Nvidia control panel. I thought it was overworking my poor old 1070, but temps went way down after I locked the frame rate to 60… It’s kind of nice to know that this is most likely a game bug and not my card melting down.”
He||razør: “Dirt 4 was the exact same way.. Completely un-optimized, and didn’t even support more than 8 cores on some configurations of hardware. The stuttering is the game not being compatible with your all cores activated. It’s ridiculous to have to go through deactivating cores for one game just to get better performance and not even be able to utilize your full hardware. Codemasters are definitely not masters of Code. They’ve fallen hard like Bethesda and keep business going with cash grabs like this..”
Personally, I’ve never had to deactivate cores to run a game properly, and I’m not familiar with anything to do with that, as I’d probably screw something up, so I’m going to leave that well alone. Hence, unless things are resolved with a patch, as you can see from some footage, I’ll still be getting jittery graphics whatever setting the graphics are on. You can tell from the names above each car: they flicker from left to right and back again. It’s really crap.
If you’re still interested in checking this out, then other options in the game including race objectives including from basically to finish the race, to extra ones such as performing 2 overtakes, trading paint on one jump, and exceeding 70 mile an hour for 5 seconds. There’s also lots of music tracks, although I’ll switch the music off because I’m wanting to capture game footage. Plus, you can create and share playgrounds, but using one playground was more than enough, because it literally drive me to distraction!
So far, I’m feeling like 4/10 is about all I can give this at the moment. The sound is the only thing I can’t criticise too much because every racing game has rasping vehicle sound effects. However, the graphics stutter and have a low frame rate, and this leads to a bad gameplay experience, and just not a whole heap of fun.
There’s a load of gameplay footage in a playlist below, along with a PS5 Trailer Reaction posted on Thursday Nov 5th at 9am.
Like I said, I’ll check it out again after the release date on Friday, by which point, hopefully, a Day 1 Patch will resolve the issues, although based on He||razør’s comment above, I’m not hopeful.
UPDATE: Since the Day 1 Update, I tried the game again. A drive through Dreyer’s Gate, Norway on Ultra High settings was a bit more palatable, but I still had to go down to High settings to get something more reasonable. Then a few races later, the game crashed back to desktop AGAIN, so that appears to be a thing. You can see these examples below.
Hence, a slight increase in the overall score from 4/10 to 4.5/10, but still not one to race into buying right now.
I want to get a new PC for the latest games, but am just waiting to see how things settle down between now and about January, I reckon, for the new graphics cards and CPUs.
Overall: 4.5/10
Dirt 5 is released this Friday, November 6th, on on PC/Steam, PS4 (with free update to PS5) and Xbox One (with free update to Xbox Series X).
My rig:
- Intel i7 Six Core Processor i7-5820K (3.3GHz) 15MB Cache
ASUS® X99-A: ATX, HSW-E CPU, USB 3.0, SATA 6 GB/s Motherboard
16Gb Kingston Hyper-X Fury DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 8GB)
4GB nVidia GeForce GTX 980
250Gb Samsung 850 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540Mb/sR | 520Mb/sW)
3Tb 3.5″ SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200rpm 64Mb cache
16x BLU-RAY WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW
CORSAIR 750W CS Series Modular 80 Plus ® Gold, Ultra Quiet
Creative Sound Blaster Z 5.1 PCI-E Soundcard – OEM
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1
Zalman Z11 Plus Black Mid Tower Case
Important info:
- Developer: Codemasters Cheshire
- Publisher: Codemasters
- Players: Single player campaign, multiplayer
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.