Owners of ATI's DirectX 11 cards can finally let them loose on Codemasters' DiRT 2, which has officially started shipping December 1. AMD included a download voucher for the game with its latest HD 5000 series Radeons, and although we prefer stuff with blood, guns and gore, this was a rather nice move.

DirectX 11 promises better water reflections, more detailed crowd models, improved cloth effects, while Shader 5.0 should deliver more accurate lighting and shadows and higher depth HDRI effects.

Sadly, AMD is still struggling to meet demand for its HD 5800/5900 series cards, but Nvidia fanboys are even worse off, as the green team won't have any DirectX 11 products well into 2010.

Update: Although DiRT 2 has officially launched, it's not quite as available as we hoped. In fact, Steam is listing it available on December 4 rather than December 1, so most people will have to wait a couple of days more. As if paper launching graphics cards wasn't enough...