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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 when you look at the charts you are looking at the following cards:
- GeForce 7600 GT 256MB
- GeForce 8600 GT 256MB (XFX edition thus faster clocked than reference)
- GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB (BFG OC edition thus faster clocked than reference)
- GeForce 7900 GS 256MB
- Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB
- GeForce 8600 GTS SLI
In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. This is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games.
As you can see, the 8600 GT is very close to the 7600 GT. The GTS is doing slightly better yet can't beat a cheaper Radeon X1950 Pro.
Obviously since we are testing many GeForce 8600 cards today, also a comparison of performance between all brands: BFG - Galaxy - Point of View and XFX.
