Page 11 - Prey & Serious Sam 2

Gaming: Prey

Prey tells the story of Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on a reservation going nowhere. Abducted along with his people to a menacing mother ship orbiting Earth, he sets out to save himself and his girlfriend and eventually his planet.

In Prey, players enter a living spaceship that enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Prey turns the first-person-shooter genre upside-down with new gameplay features like wall-walking and gravity flipping, making for intense single- and multiplayer experiences. Prey is built on a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine and is developed by Human Head Studios under the direction of 3D Realms.

The Jetway throughout our tests was 100% equal towards the reference model we tested last week. Therefore I opted to include results from other cards opposed to using two exactly similar using cards. Anyway, the Jetway HD 2900 XT shows close performance to a GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB.

At 360 EUR the Jetway Radeon HD2900 XT is showing really good performance. In red you can observe the two Radeon HD 2900 XT cards enabled in the Crossfire setup. It surely works as performance has almost doubled up in the highest resolutions.

What you are looking at, are the results at 4xAA and 16xAF with all possible image IQ settings to high in-game. Not bad at all.

Since the GeForce 8800 Ultra costs roughly the same amount of money as 2x a Radeon HD 2900 XT we included that card as well.

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 return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while its 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.

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. Here we see the scenario where the HD 2900 XT in the lower resolutions lacks performance. These are very obvious driver issues. Also notice how close that X1950 XTX performance is to the 2900 XT. AMD has this to say about it:

Why in some AA cases does your performance on the Radeon X1950 beat that of the Radeon HD 2900 XT?

We've identified a performance problem on R6xx with Adaptive AA enabled, which lowers performance more than expected in some games.  This can lead to cases where HD 2000 boards perform lower than previous generations. We are currently looking at a fix for this.

Anyway, you'll play a lovely game of Serious Sam with the Jetway card. Crossfire definitely is showing off, yet can't keep up with a single GeForce 8800 ultra here.