Page 17 - Serious Sam 2 & Splinter Cell 3 - Chaos Theory

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.

So then, the cards we'll use mostly in today's review will be high-end cards. I did decide to throw in the GeForce 7900 GS in most of the benchmarks just to show you that this relatively cheap and good performing card is being slaughtered by the G80. Also in most cases NVIDIA is shouting to have x2 performance over the flagship product GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB. So I definitely could not leave that one out. From the competition I included the mighty fine Radeon X1950 XTX.

other then that w'e obviously include the results from BFG's GeForce 8800 GTS, the NVIDIA reference 8800 GTX and the Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTX although this card performs 100% the same as the NV reference card.

Buckle up...

What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends 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. 

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 and it's gameplay experience. 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.

• So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
• 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. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
• 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, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.

So remember this: 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.

And yes, 2560x1600

Splinter Cell 3 - Chaos Theory

Sam Fisher returns for his third installment. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third game in the acclaimed Splinter Cell series, manages to improve the games visuals, make the gameplay a bit more nonlinear and adds some new gameplay modes to the already exhaustive Splinter Cell brand. Anyone who has seen Chaos Theory in action can attest to its visual masterpiece. Dynamic lighting is back in a big way. No longer are shadows blobby, elongated representations of the characters. Now we have shadows that are detailed and exact.
Another of the biggest renovations of the graphics is the amazing use of bump and normal mapping. Now when you are sulking around in the shadows of espionage Sam actually has a recognizable face, with expressions and features that look real. Rather than the flat textured faces we have seen in the games previous.

The game is so darn good.  

Splinter Cell 3 has been out for a while now and we recently recorded a timedemo. Finally we have a title that can utilize and stress a high-end graphics card. Let me tell you what we enabled in our configuration.

Even after a year SplinterCell 3 is rough on pretty much any videocard.

Here we measured performance with 16 levels of AF enabled (this title does not support AA) and obviously had HDR activated. With such settings for the previous flagship G70 (GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB) it was barely possible to play at 2560x1600 with 30 FPS. Well, the GTS pushes 37 FPS and the GTX an amazing 53 FPS.

But let's go back to 1600x1200. The G70 pushes 60 FPS where the GTX is doing 98 FPS, that is big. Also notice how competitive the GTS and the X1900 XTX are to each other. It's clear that the GTS is being positioned against the Radeon X1950 XTX and the GTX, well it simply does not have any competition in the single GPU segment.