Page 11 - Serious Sam SE Performance

Serious Sam Second EncounterThe Serious Engine can render huge distances and complex architecture. It is not enough to just make things big. You need to have both large scale architecture and small scale details at the same time. We can render huge towns, beautiful terrains and complex rooms. Reconstruction of ancient Egyptian temple complex at Karnak (from Serious Sam) demonstrates sense of scale and complexity of architecture.

SE is very much like the Quake3 engine in the terms of OpenGL calls. But, since SE is more complicated than Q3Engine, it requires some more OpenGL functions. Pictures from Serious Engine may look awkward, different from what you can see elsewhere. That's because they are filled with bright, natural colors. Serious Engine has powerful lighting and texturizing abilities, so we can avoid dark, gray, nihilistic colors. Ability to create bright, realistic scenes does not imply that dark and moody atmospheres cannot be achieved. On the contrary, Serious Engine has ability to create moody scenes at least comparable with competitive engines. The Serious Engine has shadow rendering algorithms so powerful that it calculates shadows as you move lights in editor. That is extremely important when decorating interiors. You do not have to wait any more to see how your world will look. In the Serious Engine, shadows are always up to date. If you add a column, it will immediately cast shadows.

Serious Sam is powered by 'Serious engine' featuring state of the art technology including:

• Both complex indoor and outdoor scenes in one engine,
• Multiple direction gravity,
• Advanced LOD for loads of enemies at the same time,
• Directional light for daylight scenes,
• Portals and mirrors,
• Truly dynamic volumetric fog and haze,
• Both skinned and multi-part models combined,
• Hyper-texturing and hyper-mapping for life-like richly detailed environments,
• High polygon count multi-resolution meshes,
• Photo-realistic lens flares with real-time lens reflections,
• Advanced particle system,
• Procedural textures (water, fire, smoke, plasma, electricity),
• Photo-realistic reflections, specularity and bumps,

Right, let's take a look at the performance that we measured with Serious Sam the Second encounter.

Serious Sam can be run on virtually any graphics card, yet the 9600 is really having a rough time with it. Don't worry though, even at 12x10 it's extremely playable. 

With 4xAA and  8xAF the bugger still pushes out something like 57 FPS in Quality mode at 1024x768 which is quite satisfactory to see.