Page 15

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.

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled.

This is the reality throughout the entire benchmark session. The 2600 XT will not be able to beat the 8600 GT. We have to be fair here as the 2600 XT's are also cheaper than the 8600 GT.

In all session we'll also include the results of the HD 2900 XT, this way you can observe the entire DX10 lineup of ATI's Radeon graphics cards.

All our tests have been done on Windows Vista Business edition; yes we are slowly moving on towards DX10 titles.

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 its 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. S.t.a.l.k.e.r. does not support hardware Antialiasing but instead uses a software approach. We also enabled 16x AF.

IQ settings wise this is what 98% of you will be using. Realistically you are barely able to play the game at 10x7 with a 2400 XT. The 2600 Xt does a much better job; where you can play up-to 1920x1200.

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