I bought Dirt 3 on a Steam sale. I liked the previous game so I was looking forward to it. I quickly found out the game wouldn't work at all. It would show the logo in a little box and close that after a while and nothing more would happen.

I read a bunch of guides telling me to reinstall this and that. I couldn't get anything to work at all. By accident I got it to work however.

My specs are as follows:
Windows 8.1 x64
Geforce GTX 770

What I did was this:

1) Install the Geforce driver for your graphics card and choose to install Geforce Experience as well.
2) Open up Geforce Experience.
3) In the Games tab, click on Dirt 3.
4) Choose to use optimal settings.

That's really all I did and now the game works. I have no idea what to do if you have an ATI based graphics card. I imagine ATI might have something similar to Geforce Experience.