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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 turn return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while it's 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. This actually is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games.
The GeForce 7600 GS is a budget card, meaning that you can play games in 10x7 without too many image quality settings and when you are in luck 1280x1024 should be do-able as well.
Now we already knew that for the money the 7600 GS offers good bang for your bucks. Have a look at the chart. All the way on your left you can see the card with it's defaults clocks and in the color red the maximum overclock.
Due to framebuffer bandwidth and graphical horsepower you'll be limited towards lower resolutions. But you have to admit, dang that overclock works out really well.
All the way to your right you'll see the performance of a 50 bucks more expensive 7900 GS. You'll notice that when the 7600 GS is overclocked it can come really close.
Splinter Cell 3 - Chaos Theory
Sam Fisher returns for his third installment. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third game in the acclaimed Splinter Cell series, manages to improve the games visuals, make the gameplay a bit more nonlinear and adds some new gameplay modes to the already exhaustive Splinter Cell brand. Anyone who has seen Chaos Theory in action can attest to its visual masterpiece. Dynamic lighting is back in a big way. No longer are shadows blobby, elongated representations of the characters. Now we have shadows that are detailed and exact.
Another of the biggest renovations of the graphics is the amazing use of bump and normal mapping. Now when you are sulking around in the shadows of espionage Sam actually has a recognizable face, with expressions and features that look real. Rather than the flat textured faces we have seen in the games previous.
The game is so darn good.
Splinter Cell 3 has been out for a while now and we recently recorded a timedemo. Finally we have a title that can utilize and stress a high-end graphics card. Let me tell you what we enabled in our configuration.
Even after a year SplinterCell 3 is rough on pretty much any videocard.
Here we measured performance with 16 levels of AF enabled (this title does not support AA) and obviously had HDR activated.
Again if we compare the default clocked card (400/700) with our maximum overclocked results (674/840) the difference is huge. You bump up the performance roughly by a third.
