Incredible texture fidelity on people and terrain. Larger crowds of people and vehicles, powered by a substantial boost to CPU specs. Virtual worlds that can stretch much further into the distance, owing to a faster I/O architecture.

When I think about the promise of Xbox Series or PlayStation 5, I look back at bullet-point lists in the recent hype cycle. The first major issue with DiRT 5 is how seemingly current-gen the whole game looks.

But DiRT 5's first taste of 120Hz racing on a console, and what it takes to get there, is fascinating enough to merit an asterisk-covered preview. I urge you to keep an eye out for more next-gen game impressions before loading ammunition into your preferred 'console war' cannon. I want to be clear: DiRT 5, in its pre-release preview state, is not the best foot forward for Xbox Series X, and I'm not entirely sure it's representative of the console's next-gen promise. That's a substantial increase from the 60fps max of past console generations (and a big rally-car leap above the 30fps cap you typically see on current-gen games).

What's more, it is the first game I've ever tested for a bespoke game console with frame rates up to 120fps. Today, for the first time, I'm allowed to lift the curtain on a game made for Xbox Series consoles: DiRT 5, the latest drift-heavy racing game from Codemasters. Most of my effort has revolved around its massive backwards-compatible feature set-as seen in a very long feature about how older games benefit from newer hardware. While I have been testing a pre-release Xbox Series X console for nearly a month, ahead of its November 10 launch, I have had very few new games to test on it.

Dirt 5 xbox series x