Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

The next game using OpenGL is Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. We tested with 32bit color and also ran a standard “GFX:Extreme Quality” add-on enabling maximum image quality settings, including maximum supported anisotropic filtering. Just like in Quake3 Arena, we used Performance mode for the anisotropic filtering by ATI RADEON 9500 Pro, and Quality mode for anisotropic filtering by NVIDIA chips.

Well, here the new NVIDIA solutions do not look in the best way, I assume. However, let’s dwell on the results and discuss them in greater detail. First, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x can be disregarded from the very beginning, as this chip supports only up to anisotropy level=2 and ensures a considerably lower texture filtering quality than the other testing participants. Second, we can disregard ATI RADEON 9000 Pro results. This chip supports up to 16x anisotropic filtering, but the filtering quality provided is hardly comparable with what we see by GeForce FX solutions. So, what do we have left? ATI RADEON 9500 Prom which boasts a much better anisotropic filtering quality even in Performance mode, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200-8x and GeForce FX based solutions.

No wonder that ATI RADEON 9500 Pro appears faster than the new NVIDIA GeForce FX chips. However, the fastest of the new chips, GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, which is expected to replace GeForce4 Ti, shows much better results than GeForce4 Ti4200-8x solution.

With enabled full-screen anti-aliasing the situation changes: GeForce FX 5600 Ultra easily beats GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, while GeForce FX 5200 Ultra and GeForce FX 5200 turn out faster than ATI RADEON 9000 Pro an d GeForce4 MX440-8x.

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro remained too far ahead. The new NVIDIA GeForce FX couldn’t even get close to it.