Serious Sam 2

The Serious Sam II follows the best traditions of the first two titles in the series, giving you a simple plot, crowds of enemies that totally lack any intellect, and a lot of various weapons. The new graphics engine is pretty demanding for performance once the best image quality is enabled, as it features advanced shader effects, like per-pixel lighting with normal-map bump-mapping, parallax mapping as well as a lot of reflections and refractions. Additionally, the game acquired HDR, which we do not enable during testing because it demonstrates artifacts in some cases, as well as capable of using Shader Model 3.0, but to optimize performance, not to improve quality of graphics.

High-End Graphics Cards

A flaw in the driver that already affected results in Call of Duty 2 seems to have influenced results in this case too: 256MB graphics cards based on the RADEON processors show very low results that hardly allow to play comfortably.

The GeForce 7800 family, by contrast, performs very well, even though the Serious Sam 2 game appears to be so graphics processing hungry that even the GeForce 7800 GTX falls on its knees in case of the 1600x1200 resolution.

When it comes to eye candy, the RADEON X1800 XT 512MB manages to outperform the original GeForce 7800 GTX, however, can surpass neither the 60fps limit, nor the GeForce 7800 GTX 512. In fact, in resolutions higher than 1280x1024 in the current case none of today?s graphics cards can attain 60 frames per second once FSAA and AF are activated and graphics settings are set to the highest possible.

The GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is the fastest performer for the Serious Sam 2 money can buy.