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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.

What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously we tend to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself. 

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled which is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. And yes .. the card will LAUGH at the game. Look how close it is to two 7900 512Mb GTX cards at 900 bucks.

3DMark 05 Business Edition
3DMark 06 Business Edition
Literally millions and millions benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark series, 3DMark03 up-to 3Dmark06, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems.

Let's have a look at 3DMark 05 and 06 scores. Very respectable performance for all cards with obviously the Masterpiece on top. Now a small sidenote, since these test where done on an older test platform, some of the newer cards had not been tested with some of our newer benchmarks on this platform. We'll try and match as close as possible though.

Let's focus at 3DMark06 a bit more in-depth.

Overall that's a very good score considering it's been done on a single core FX-57 CPU. On a Core 2 Duo E6600 or higher platform you can add a thousand points easily.