Playing games on Linux seems to be getting better every year. Another great racing game is added to the growing game library of Linux. Feral Interactive, one of the popular Linux game porters, released DiRT Rally on Linux last March 2, 2017. That’s a gap of about 1 year since the game was initially released on Windows last December 7 , 2015. The game is focused on rallying which may seem boring if I define it in words. Watch this video for a quick info on about what rallying is. There is still no user-friendly benchmark tool like OCAT available for Linux so we used the built-in benchmark tool. It depicts real world game play and the benchmark sequence lasts about 3 minutes and 25 seconds. As usual with our game benchmarks, the results shown are the average of 3 runs. The game was benchmarked using the test system shown below.

Performance

The game caters to a wide audience in terms of required hardware. We haven’t tested yet but we think you should be able to play it with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti paired with Pentium G4560. For those who are using a much slower GPU like GeForce GTX 750 Ti, you can try to disable anti-aliasing. Doing so will increase frame rate by approximately 34%. Just take note that jagged edges will be easily noticeable if anti-aliasing is disabled. According to Feral Interactive, a Core i7 4770 is needed if the GPU to be used is GeForce GTX 970. The game ran fine on our test system that has a GeForce GTX 970 paired with Core i3 6100. No stuttering was observed and the CPU was not 100% loaded during gaming. It is also worth pointing out that no serious issues were encountered even if the operating system of the test system is Zorin OS 12 which is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Feral Interactive officially supports only Ubuntu 16.10 and SteamOS. Out of curiosity, we also tested the effect of Hyper Threading. The game ran surprisingly well on an Intel Skylake dual-core CPU without Hyper Threading. No stuttering was observed in the benchmarking process. Memory speed has a negligible effect on game performance. We will test it further in the future on much powerful hardware.

Supported Input Devices

You probably wouldn’t want to play this game using a keyboard. The table below shows the officially supported input devices. We were only able to test the wired Xbox 360 gamepad and it worked without problems.

Closing Thoughts

We didn’t expect DiRT Rally to come to Linux since no plan for a Linux release was announced by Codemasters when the game was initially released for Windows. The game is available at Steam for PhP 1,439.95 and should be on your games-to-buy list if you are a fan of rallying or if you are looking for a great game you can play on a budget gaming PC. If you want to buy it at a cheaper price, you can wait for the Steam Summer Sale which usually happens on June – July. According to SteamDB, DiRT Rally’s lowest discounted price was PhP 575.98. DiRT Rally can also be bought at The Feral Store for $59.99. You’ll receive a Steam product code since there are no retail discs for Linux games. Feral Interactive earn more money if you purchase directly from them. They also conduct discount promos and you can wait for it if $59.99 is too expensive for you.