ERC crews tackle the Acropolis Rally in Greece this weekend and as the release for DiRT4 is imminent we jumped behind the wheel of an AMD liveried Ford Fiesta RS Rally car and contested the Ampelonas Ormi Sprint stage to be in top shape for the new off-road racing game.
This is the first test where we compare the performance of different CPUs. In the last few weeks we received quite a lot of criticism about the hardware setup we opted for the A10 APU vs RX 550 versus videos – many suggested that the i3 Kaby Lake CPU is just to good against the A10 Steamroller-based cores. Although I agree that for some games strong single-core performance is essential (mainly open-world games with huge view distances that require data streaming, huge scene-graph traversal) and in that case the i3 is far superior than the A10, many other games play just as fine on AMD Kaveri CPUs, the gap is not that enormous that some might think. DiRT Rally is a very well optimized game, the RX 550 is capable of maintaining decent frame rates on both CPUs – 1080p and medium quality was used.
DiRT Rally resultsDiRT Rally FPS & FCAT chartsDiRT Rally i3-7100 FPS chartDiRT Rally i3-7100 FCAT chartDiRT Rally A10-7890K FPS chartDiRT Rally A10-7890K FCAT chart