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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 what we did today was include results from the 3 most common GeForce cards we tested, yet also the ATI Radeon X1650 XT 256MB as well. What I need you to focus on the most is the GeForce 7900 GS versus this XFX card.
So when you look at the charts you are looking at the following cards:
- X1650 XTX- ATI Radeon X1650 XT 256MB memory
- GeForce 7600 GT - XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatality edition 256 MB memory, passive cooler
- GeForce 7900 GS 256MB
- GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB
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 no issue for the XFX 7600 GT Fatality edition.
Company of Heroes
New in our benchmark test suite 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 has set 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.
Now this is the first card we measure so we only have results for this card. Over time obviously more and more results from different cards will be added. Have a look. You'll notice that if needed we "could" play the game with 4xAA and 16xAF at 1600x1200. It's not recommended though. 1280x1024 is the perfect choice of weapon here.
