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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 that number is the more fluently your game will display itself. 

A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game(play). After forcing the same image quality settings this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

If a card can only manage less than 30 FPS then the game is barely playable.
With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts.

When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game.

You are always aiming for the highest possible FPS, versus the highest resolution, versus the highest image quality.

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.

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 P790+ SLI on top, and I like things on top ;)
3DMark is designed in a way that excludes the CPU in the score calculation and tries to focus purely on DX9 graphics card performance. The higher the score the better the card performs.

Why are two P790+ cards faster than the dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 you ask ? Simple .. it's clocked faster.

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