Codemasters Dirt Rally Games – A Performance History

CODEMASTER’s Colin McRae / Dirt is a long running series of racing games. The latest entry in the series, Dirt 5 was released in 2020 and is the 14th title in the series. Below is the list of all the titles.

  1. Colin McRae Rally (1998)
  2. Colin McRae Rally 2.0 (2000)
  3. Colin McRae Rally 3 (2002)
  4. Colin McRae Rally 04 (2003)
  5. Colin McRae Rally 2005 (2004)
  6. Colin McRae: Dirt (2007)
  7. Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (2009)
  8. Dirt 3 (2011)
  9. Dirt: Showdown (2012)
  10. Colin McRae Rally (2013)
  11. Dirt Rally (2015)
  12. Dirt 4 (2017)
  13. Dirt Rally 2.0 (2019)
  14. Dirt 5 (2020)

In this article, we will summarize and compare the performance of four of these titles (in bold in the list above). We would have included Dirt 4 and Dirt Rally 2.0 as well, but unlike the other four titles, these game do not feature built-in benchmarks.

The results shown below and the screenshots that follow have been generated using the built-in benchmark. All in-game settings were set to the maximum available quality.

It is interesting to see that Dirt Rally and Dirt 5 perform very similarly. This is surprising, considering that Dirt Rally is four years older than Dirt 5. Dirt 5 also looks better to me.

Dirt 2 4K Screenshots

Dirt 3 8K Screenshots

Dirt Rally 8K Screenshots

Dirt 5 8K Screenshots