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Before we begin, we'll first do a benchmark session with a multitude of graphics cards separately. Later on in the article we'll have a couple of pages with in-depth SLI results compared to other SLI possibilities.
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.
What we did today was include results from the most recent GeForce cards we tested. So when you look at the charts you are looking at the following cards:
- GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB NVIDIA reference model
- GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB BFG
- GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB reference
- GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB BFG
- GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB XFX
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.
Serious Sam 2 is getting a little dated thus we see flat out CPU limitation up-to 1280x1024. This is the point where your graphics cards could render faster yet the CPU is not providing geometry fast enough.
If it doesn't make sense to you that the 320 MB GTS cards are faster here and there compared to the 640 Mb model then pelase bare in mind that we have the pre-overclocked versions of the 320 MB cards, thus the core and in XFX'es case, the memory as well are clocked significantly higher.
It makes the benchmarks a little harder to comprehend. But in non-memory limited games the 320 MB models would be faster (typically lower resolutions) and as soon as memory starts to matter the 640 MB model will start showing off (higher resolutions).
Company of Heroes
New in our benchmark suit is company of heroes. It's most likely one of the best real-time strategy (RTS) games of 2006/2007, Company of Heroes (COH) Graphics, audio, game play, immersiveness, artificial intelligence, user interface and everything else is setting a fantastic standard in today's gaming experience. Guru3D recently picked up the game as it was recommended pretty much everywhere. We look at the level where you have to clear the Church area. It's loaded with geometry, objects and hostiles. So that's a good balance between CPU utilization and graphics "consumption".
The settings for COH are simple to replicate. We enable every little setting possible and measure at 16xAF and 4xAA. COH is a brilliant game and therefore we need to show you how well it performs on this graphics card versus the resolutions available to us.
With 4xAA and 16xAF at 2560x1600 we can still play brilliantly. Surprizingly, very little difference between the 640 and 320 MB models.
