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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.
Our little secret, 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 at all. However when I heard that the game supports HDR I ran to the store! Look at the screenshot at the bottom of this page. That's HDR at work.
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 effortlessly. It's a tie between the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512 SLi cards and ATI's X1900 XT Crossfire. There's CPU limitation up-to 1600x1200.
An average of 131 frames per second at 1920x1200 people !!
3DMark 03 Professional Edition
3DMark 05 Business Edition
3DMark 06 Business Edition
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million 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, 3DMark06s, continues this tradition by providing a 100% Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
Last year when 3DMark 05 was released (February I think) it became the standard for DirectX 9 benchmarking and it was well received by the consumer and industry. In the months following I however honestly felt the benchmark was good but not yet perfect as some very important features were left out. NVIDIA started their bragging rights with Shader Model 3 last year already, yet they also introduced something new and exciting called High Dynamic Range (HDR), which is one of the more beautiful technologies we saw last year. There's still very few games supporting it to the fullest yet mark my words, 2006 is going to be an exciting year in game development. New technology that is being introduced needs to go mainstream in hardware, accepted by the consumer and then game developers will start using it. A process that usually takes one or two years. It of course doesn't stop there. Subsurface scattering, the introduction of dynamic soft shadows and much, much more are all very exciting to see.
From left to right 3DMark 06, 05 and 03. 7284 3DMark06 points people.
Needless to say that 3DMark06 entails all the new features and we will take a brief look at this exciting new update of the software. I say update because in essence 3DMark06 is 3DMark05, yet with a complete overhaul of features for some exciting end results.
This benchmark series is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. What I wanted to show you here is the difference between Crossfire and single card solutions when it comes to Shader performance as it's almost doubled up compared to the X1900 XTX. It's 2x48 Pixel Shader units active.
