X-bit labs

Two for One: Nvidia's Dual-Chip GeForce 7950 GX2 Reviewed (page 22)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 06/09/2006 | 06:01 PM ]

Serious Sam 2

Average and minimum speeds differ greatly in Serious Sam 2 . The most powerful solution from Nvidia, the SLI configuration with two GeForce 7900 GTX cards, has the best average result, but its min speed is below 25fps in 1024x768 and below 20fps in higher resolutions. Although you can run the game on a GeForce 7950 GX2 with enabled 4x FSAA, the game may get jerky at times.

Note that the immediate rival to the GeForce 7950 GX2, the Radeon X1900 XTX has a min speed of about 30fps in 1024x768. So it ensures a smoother game play at a lower average speed, and this despite the not very Radeon-friendly rendering methods employed by the developers of Serious Sam2 .

The multi-GPU configurations Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire and GeForce 7900 GTX SLI deliver a nearly comfortable performance here. The other multi-GPU solutions are unable to do that. Judging by the average speed, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is close to that, buts its min speed is too low – a sudden slowdown to 14-15fps may mean death for your character during a combat.

In the hardest mode it’s only the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire that can notch the 50fps mark in 1024x768. The min speed is only 16fps at that which means slowdowns in complex game scenes. In other words, Serious Sam 2 is not very friendly towards extreme full-screen antialiasing modes. Well, you can hardly play it in resolutions higher than 1024x768 even with ordinary 4x FSAA!