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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.

So what we did today was include results from the three most recent BFG GeForce 8800 cards we tested, yet also the flagship ATI card, Radeon 1950 XTX 512MB and to show you at what performance level we are working a mid-range card; in this case a GeForce 7900 GS.

So when you look at the charts you are looking at the following cards:

• 7900GS - GeForce 7900 GS 256 MB
• X1950 XTX - ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB memory
• 8800 GTS BFG - BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB memory, stock cooler
• 8800 GTX BFG - BFG GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB memory, watercooled edition
• 8800 GTX BFG - 2x BFG GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB memory, watercooled edition in SLI

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 I play my games at 2560x1600 when possible. As you can see this is an easy job with this title for the G80 cards. The GTX's at 25x16 are pushing 139 FPS on average. In SLI ... oh only 166 FPS :)

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, that's why I love it !

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 (not in the chart though). Well, the GTS pushes 37 FPS and the GTX an amazing 53 FPS. But have a look at SLI in 2560x1600; over 100 FPS on average.  Well if that doesn't give you a serious boner I don't know what will.