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Written By:
Date Posted: October 2 , 2002
Serious Sam SE Demo
When the first Serious Sam game came out many people were impressed with the quality of the graphics provided by this game. Needless to say the second game provides an even nicer set of graphics, with more realistic outdoor grass and trees. Let us look at how the Parhelia performs in this graphically demanding game. The settings were automatically detected for each video card with only ansiotropic filtering disabled, and anti-aliasing disabled, with it only being enabled in the drivers. Can the Parhelia perform as well as it did in Jedi Knight II?
| Video Card |
Min FPS |
Avg. FPS |
Max FPS |
| Kyro II: |
0 |
64.57 |
103 |
| Parhelia: |
18 |
51.92 |
97 |
Some interesting results here, the Parhelia can't beat the Kyro II. However the Kyro II did have a 'hiccup' where it went down to 0fps as we can see in the graph. It seems like the Parhelia can't go that far above 80fps for more than 1 second. Whether this is a result of Serious Sam not detecting the Parhelia correctly, as I could not get a correct reading when I ran benchmark() in the console, or a CPU limit, or even a video limit cannot be said for sure at this point, however the Parhelia still performs fairly well. What about when we add the extra features?
| Video Card |
Min FPS |
Avg. FPS |
Max FPS |
| Kyro II: |
1 |
6.9 |
13 |
| Parhelia: |
19 |
39.32 |
69 |
The Kyro II can't seem to perform all that well if we add ansiotropic filtering and 4X anti-aliasing, but things are different with the Parhelia. The Parhelia loses a total of 32% of its frame rate when we turn on ansiotropic filtering and 16X FAA. It also seems that the Parhelia is more GPU limited in this benchmark than as without these features turned on. Does the Parhelia perform the same in 1600*1200 as it does with AA and ansiotropic on?
| Video Card |
Min FPS |
Avg. FPS |
Max FPS |
| Kyro II: |
0 |
30.98 |
40 |
| Parhelia: |
18 |
33.68 |
56 |
As we see with this graph, the Kyro II is very GPU limited as its maximum frame rate is only 9fps faster than its average frame rate, and we can see that the frame rate graph for the Kyro II is flatter than the Parhelia. The Parhelia on the other hand is slightly more GPU limited than with AA and ansiotropic filtering enabled at 1024*768. We can see with Serious Sam that once the quality or resolution is turned up the Parhelia can beat the older generation Kyro II which previous performs about as good as a GeForce 2 in many games. Now let us look at some DirectX 8+ benchmarks.
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