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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.

You know .. I really am not a fan of this game and therefore did not want to buy it. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game yet .. so not the kind of game that I like. When I heard that the game supports HDR I ran to the store though ! Look at the screenshot below. That's HDR my friends.

Now above you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering. This actually is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. With this high-level of IQ you can play the game up-to 1920x1200 easily. Impressive huh ? Unfortunately NO SLI results as I only had one 7800 GTX 512MB sample left before I got Serious Sam 2.

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

Splinter Cell

First in our benchmark suite is the very popular game Splinter Cell. Making a believable world for a spy to play in is quite a daunting task, but the levels are varied, filled with appropriate objects, and designed so that you usually dont have to choose between too many paths. It wouldve been great if you couldve had several points of entrance and that way get a lot more replay-value. Sam and the rest of the characters do look terrific, with high polygon models and both crisp and appropriate looking textures. What really separates Splinter Cell from most recent action games is the use of shadows. Splinter Cell uses the Unreal engine, which weve seen in several great looking games the past months, but UbiSoft also added improved lighting. By using real-time cast shadows, lightmaps, etc, this title gives you some of the best looking shadows to date.

In response to the growing use of sophisticated digital encryption to conceal potential threats to the national security of the United States, the NSA (National Security Agency) has ushered forth a new dawn of intelligence-gathering techniques. This top-secret initiative is dubbed Third Echelon. Denied to exist by the U.S. government, Third Echelon deploys elite intelligence-gathering units consisting of a lone field operative supported by a remote team. Like a sliver of glass, a Splinter Cell is small, sharp, and nearly invisible.

You have the right to spy, steal, destroy and assassinate, to ensure that American freedoms are protected. If captured, the U.S. government will disavow any knowledge of your existence.

You are Sam Fisher.

You are a Splinter Cell.

Splinter Cell is a DirectX 8/9 title and can handle a nice set of Shaders. We force Projector mode in high detail on all graphics cards. Again, graphics cards without shader capabilities will run into a problem as they do not support it. We are talking about GeForce4 MX and earlier models (excluding the GeForce 3 series) only. With that in mind, this software really is an excellent benchmark. Small sidenote, we are not using the standard timedemo's. We made one ourselves that stresses the fillrate of a graphics card and will utilize the CPU very little.

Let's take a look at some of the benchmark numbers. Unlike some of the future games Splinter Cell doesnt use per-pixel lighting, so the framerate should be quite good even for owners of mid-end PCs.

Let's start off with an explanation on how to look at the results. You are looking at the score measured in an average framerate. "50" would equal the average performance at 50 rendered 3D frames per second. Remember that our minimum is 30 and we consider 60 or above optimal.

All those cards were tested on an AMD 64 FX-57 based PC with PCI-Express interface. Although it was the the first release of the series, I find Splinter Cell to be an excellent piece of software to test the graphics card's capability. The results above are with 16 levels of Anisotropic Filtering enabled.

Both SLi and Crossfire have issues running in dual card mode in this game on our setup. Hey what can I tell ya .. we show it all. Even if it doesn't work 100%