Whilst out at the launch party for Nvidia's new GeForce 7800GTX, we got a chance to play with the new Serious Sam game, currently just called Serious Sam 2.
We brought you a couple of screenshots last month.
Well, we took some time out from the blazing sun to fiddle with the console and try and get some benchmarks going, and this is what we found.
The game uses Shader Model 2.0++ with fallback to Shader Models 1.4 and 1.1 on older cards. With 2, there is the full complement of HDR lighting, parallax mapping and all the other fancy effects that you would expect from a bleeding-edge engine.
We benchmarked the game on a 7800 GTX SLI rig, with a FX-55 processor.
In a flyby of the game, the framerate was between 90-160 frames a second, depending on the graphical intensity of the shot. The average framerate was in the 110FPS range, with the minimum framerate around 70 - it didn't drop below 60FPS once.
This was at 1600x1200, with Shader Model 2, HDR, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on. Proof, if any more was needed, that the 7800 will handle anything you throw at it without breaking into a sweat - even next-gen game engines.
Indeed, when we switched HDR off and dropped down to Shader Model 1.1, the framerate was limited by the FX-55 processor, which couldn't go any faster.
For clarity, HDR lighting, as with Half-Life 2, is done in Shader Model 2 - meaning all cards will support it. This is achieved by using 16-bit precision, rather than full 32 or even 128-bit precision - developers Croteam told us that the visual difference was negligable.
We hope to be speaking to Croteam further in the near future, but for now, have some new screenshots as you mull over those numbers.
You can discuss this article in our forums!
We brought you a couple of screenshots last month.
Well, we took some time out from the blazing sun to fiddle with the console and try and get some benchmarks going, and this is what we found.
The game uses Shader Model 2.0++ with fallback to Shader Models 1.4 and 1.1 on older cards. With 2, there is the full complement of HDR lighting, parallax mapping and all the other fancy effects that you would expect from a bleeding-edge engine.
We benchmarked the game on a 7800 GTX SLI rig, with a FX-55 processor.
In a flyby of the game, the framerate was between 90-160 frames a second, depending on the graphical intensity of the shot. The average framerate was in the 110FPS range, with the minimum framerate around 70 - it didn't drop below 60FPS once.
This was at 1600x1200, with Shader Model 2, HDR, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on. Proof, if any more was needed, that the 7800 will handle anything you throw at it without breaking into a sweat - even next-gen game engines.
Indeed, when we switched HDR off and dropped down to Shader Model 1.1, the framerate was limited by the FX-55 processor, which couldn't go any faster.
For clarity, HDR lighting, as with Half-Life 2, is done in Shader Model 2 - meaning all cards will support it. This is achieved by using 16-bit precision, rather than full 32 or even 128-bit precision - developers Croteam told us that the visual difference was negligable.
We hope to be speaking to Croteam further in the near future, but for now, have some new screenshots as you mull over those numbers.
You can discuss this article in our forums!
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review
October 14 2021 | 15:04
Want to comment? Please log in.