Page 7
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 are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously we tend to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.
A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game(play). After forcing the same image quality settings this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.
If a card can only manage less than 30 FPS then the game is barely playable.
With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts.
When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game.
You are always aiming for the highest possible FPS, versus the highest resolution, versus the highest image quality.
| Frames per second | Gameplay |
| <30 FPS | very limited gameplay |
| 30-40 FPS | average yet very playable |
| 40-60 FPS | good gameplay |
| >60 FPS | best possible gameplay |
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, you can play up-to 1600x1200 with this card.
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.
SplinterCell 3 is is a rough on most videocards. Here we measured performance with 16 levels of AF enabled and had HDR activated. With such settings you should stick at 1024x768. Hey it's playable.
What I wanted to do today is show you the raw gaming performance relative to two cards that are roughly 80 bucks more expensive. I did this on purpose so you can have a better understanding as to why it's wise to invest a couple of tenners more, the difference is huge.
