Page 19 - Serious Sam 2

Gaming: Serious Sam 2

March 2001, developer Croteam released the original Serious Sam for the PC and pretty much made other standard first person shooters look like they were in neutral. The game, along with its stand alone follow up The Second Encounter, had an impressive graphics engine, huge outdoor environments, some wacky weapons, a fun co-op mode, and most importantly some of the numerous and strangest enemies in FPS history. When players first saw the headless bomb filled suicide attacker charging at them full blast with a blood curdling scream, they knew that this game was something special.

Four and a half years later, Croteam's return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while its basic gameplay hasn't changed it has enough new features to make it a fun and solid follow up to the original. The graphics are also greatly improved. Like the first, there is a story in Serious Sam 2 (there are even some extended cut scenes that pull the story forward) but you can pretty much ignore this aspect. It's all about "Serious" Sam Stone going from point A to point B and blowing up everything that gets in his way.

Constantly flaunting a huge draw distance, extensive foliage, many impressive lighting effects such as refraction and even HDR, plus more than solid framerates, the Serious Engine 2 looks like a real beast.

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. Here we see the scenario where the HD 2900 XT in the lower resolutions lacks performance. These are very obvious driver issues. Also notice how close that X1950 XTX performance is to the 2900 XT. AMD has this to say about it:

Why in some AA cases does your performance on the Radeon X1950 beat that of the Radeon HD 2900 XT?

We've identified a performance problem on R6xx with Adaptive AA enabled, which lowers performance more than expected in some games.  This can lead to cases where HD 2000 boards perform lower than previous generations. We are currently looking at a fix for this.

Alright, so time will tell. Let's have a peek at Vista performance. With most games we use today I figured it was important to show you guys the overall performance of Windows Vista as well.

As you can see, ATI is doing a good job with the Vista drivers. The performance loss over XP is really marginal. Let's have a peek at a more modern game; S.T.A.L.K.E.R.