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Gaming: 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 when you look at the charts you will see a mixture of the following cards:

• GeForce 7600 GS 256MB (Galaxy Premium edition thus faster clocked close to GT)
• GeForce 7600 GT 256MB (XFX XXX edition thus slightly faster clocked than reference)
• GeForce 8600 GT 256MB eVGA SC (eVGA Superclocked sample we test today)
• GeForce 8600 GT 256MB (XFX XXX edition thus faster clocked than reference)
• GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB (BFG OC edition thus faster clocked than reference)
• GeForce 7900 GS 256MB (reference)

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. As you can see, the 8600 GT is quite close to the 7600 GT. The 8600 GT does have some more horsepower though. It'll win and loose from the 7600 GT here and there as the benchmarks will show you.

Gaming: S.t.a.l.k.e.r. - Shadow of Chernobyl

Shortly after another disaster in Chernobyl, the authorities surround the area with the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Guard, and they begin to hear weird screams and rumblings coming from within. After a while, though, most of them are returned to earlier posts. Curiosity gets the better of some people, so they sneak into the 30-kilometer area to do some good old-fashioned investigating. These people are called Stalkers, and they report back to the authorities with their findings.

The 3D engine shines in a few key areas, all crucial in shaping the game's atmosphere. It's got a huge draw distance, which leads to the palpable feeling that this is a big world. Lighting and shadowing are it's other big strengths. For this benchmark we have the in-game settings at maximum (AA/AF enabled), Dynamic lighting was disabled as this feature is really for next-gen graphics cards performance wise.

As stated we went for the in-game's maximum quality settings yet with static lighting. This will give us a very good overall framerate. With the upcoming high-performance DX10 graphics cards this year later in the year we might switch towards dynamic lighting though, which will crumble the overall framerate at the very least in half.

Next to that S.t.a.l.k.e.r. does not support hardware Antialiasing ... To get you an idea where the performance stands we include a wide range of 8600 results in here.

Granted .. the 8600 series show a huge impreovement over the previous generation hardwar. Compare with the 7600 GS (clocked close to GT speeds).

IQ settings wise this is what 98% of you will be using. These surely are good numbers, really, nothing to be ashamed about.

Screenshot of where we measure framerate, this is also our image quality setting.