F1 2010 - DirectX 11

The new 6000 series AMD graphics cards and 400/500 series NVIDIA models are the most advanced on the market and F1 2010 utilizes many aspects of their DX11 technology such as Hardware tessellation on water, cloth and crowd surfaces. There is also DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occlusion and Full Floating point high dynamic range lighting as well as full screen resolution post processing. Some of these such as HADO and HDR are always enabled but hardware tessellated animated crowds and dynamic water are only turned on with ULTRA settings.

Testing was performed at 1920x1080 with 8x anti-aliasing, Ultra detail and 5760x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra in-game settings.

Late last year Codemasters released the first patch for F1 2010 and in the process removed the need to manually enable DirectX11. That alone is a great improvement but the changes didn't stop there and the game now has better support for aspects such as Eyefinity/surround gaming (3 screens).

F1 2010 gives us one of the most interesting results in this review. While the GTX 590 is perfectly capable of gaming at 1920x1080 and 5760x1080 with anti-aliasing it actually performs below the GTX 580 at 1920x1080 which is clearly a driver bug. When we move to the higher resolution the brute force of the GPUs keep it in touch with the 6990.

Here are some examples of how the game looks at our tested settings.

Click here to view the full-size screenshot (5760x1080)