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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 we did today was include results from the most competitive NVIDIA GeForce 7 series graphics cards and obviously the roughly 300 USD tagged 8800 GTS 320MB. So when you look at the charts you are looking at the following cards:

• GeForce 7900 GS 256 MB reference
• GeForce 7900 GS 256 MB Inno3D (iChill edition)
• GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB reference
• GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB (BFG OC edition which is slightly overclocked compared to reference design)

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. This is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games.

Immediately you can see why I like the 7950. For it's money it's giving great performance. With standard overclocks performance jumps close to the reference 512 MB 7950 GT.

S.t.a.l.k.e.r. - Shadow of Chernobyl

Shortly after another disaster in Chernobyl, the authorities surround the area with the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Guard, and they begin to hear weird screams and rumblings coming from within. After a while, though, most of them are returned to earlier posts. Curiosity gets the better of some people, so they sneak into the 30-kilometer area to do some good old-fashioned investigating. These people are called Stalkers, and they report back to the authorities with their findings.

The 3D engine shines in a few key areas, all crucial in shaping the game's atmosphere. It's got a huge draw distance, which leads to the palpable feeling that this is a big world. Lighting and shadowing are it's other big strengths. For this benchmark we have the in-game settings at maximum (AA/AF enabled), Dynamic lighting was disabled as this feature is really for next-gen graphics cards performance wise.

As stated we went for the in-game's maximum quality settings yet with static lighting. This is what 98% of you will be using. Obviously since S.t.a.l.k.e.r was released last week I have very little results. This makes the iChill look slower compared to the other models, but they are all classed high-end.

The 7950 GT iChill actually is doing great. Our timedemo is based on the first level you start in. Rich detail, lot's of shaders, massive objects, bushes and trees; and it's all moving from wind. Great stuff.