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Return to Castle Wolfenstein
This game is powered with a highly optimized Quake III engine. We tested the graphics card with high detail settings and of course a heavy duty time-demo.

Powered by the Quake III Arena engine, the Wolfenstein universe explodes with the kind of epic environments, A.I., firepower and cinematic effects that only a game created by true masters can deliver. The dark reich's closing in. The time to act is now. Evil prevails when good men do nothing.

A highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments. Himmler believes himself to be a reincarnation of a 10th century dark prince, Henry the Fowler, also known as Heinrich. Through genetic engineering and the harnessing of occult powers, Himmler hopes to raise an unstoppable army to level the Allies once and for all.

That being said, RTCW boasts very nice textures, impressive effects and fantastic character models, even for game this dated. A lot of people still enjoy it very much.

RTCW is the oldest game in our test suite and therefore extremely CPU limited. Your graphics cards can chew up this game alive while still having room to spare. Let's make it a bit more difficult for the graphics cards and have look at 4xAA and 8xAF listings:

I can't stress enough how CPU limited this game is and therefore I wanted it inserted into today's test as it'll show performance differences beautifully. Now we scaled the graph a bit as the range was too high, but look at that! That's a 5% differential between the slowest and the fastest memory.

Let's do one more gaming test...

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.

Now above you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering. This is actually my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. You see ? We now learn that also with modern titles there is a very sizable difference to be found when it comes to memory timings and sheer size of memory.

The 512 MB kit is performing the worst where the 1GB PDP and the 2 GB Corsair kit are way up there. Yes I think it's save to say that 1024 MB in your gaming system is not a bad choice at all. Performance differences between a 1 GB and a 2GB kit are mostly related to timings, yet in the future games will utilize more and more.

Yes, Serious Sam 2 shows exactly what HDR can do ... if you use it too much that is ;)