Serious Sam SE
Serious Sam SE brought a simple concept in fps games, have massive amounts of enimies to shoot, and fused it with high quality graphics to make it a game that can be played to take your mind off of matters. So how does the AiW work here, is it like that found with the other OpenGL game we tested?
What can we see from Serious Sam? It seems that the ATi cards do very well here, perhaps the optimizations in Serious Sam account for this. However the higher clock speed of the 9000 gives it a slight boost over the 8500LE, which means that in this case it may be GPU speed dependent, at least on the ATi side of matters. Versus the MX 440, all the ATi cards do much better, in the range of 20-30fps better (33-47%), which is a significant increase from a similarly priced video card. Overclocking the AiW 9000 gives it a 7.6% increase of frame rate, and makes the entire graph just a little bit flatter with less in the way of large variations in frame rate. How about with AA and ansiotropic filtering, does the AiW 9000 hold on to its high placing?
How does the AiW 9000 card do? We can see that it takes quite a hit from enabling AA and ansiotropic filtering in Serious Sam SE, as it loses about 75% of its frame rate just by enabling these features. The MX does better here as it takes a slightly lower hit from enabling these quality features, as it beats both the standard clocked AiW 9000 and the 8500LE. When overclocked the AiW 9000 equals, and wins by a very slim margin, against the MX 440. One small interesting feature from the frame rate graph is that the ATi cards spike slightly about halfway through the demo, which makes the maximum frame rate higher than the MX 440 while the average frame rate is still lower. But at the frame rates that these four bottom video cards are producing you will not really be able to play at these settings in Serious Sam.
Here we see a return to the results that we found at 1024*768 with high settings. The GF4 Ti4600-8X is the only card to achieve over 60fps in this test, though the ATi cards aren't too far off. The ATi cards perform between 6-13fps better (16-34%) than the MX in this case, which brings them closer to the 'playable' level that many people want. The MX 440 has a very flat graph, showing that it is GPU/memory limited at this resolution. The ATi cards aren't as GPU limited here as there have much larger 'spikes' in frame rate at two points where the frame rate reaches closer to 80fps that the average of 40-48fps. However the AiW 9000 still gets a good boost from the extra GPU/memory speed provided by overclocking, increasing its frame rate by almost 10%. Here again the AiW 9000 does better than the 8500LE, besting it by about 5%, which shows that Serious Sam likes the design of the 9000 series better than that of the 8500 series. So we can see that with Serious Sam, unlike Jedi Knight, that the ATi AiW 9000 does better than a GeForce 4 MX 440. So we can see a split between the OpenGL games, as one prefers the nVidia cards, while the other likes ATi cards. Does this continue with Direct X games, such as Max Payne and Unreal Tournament 2003? Lets find out.
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ATI All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro: ATi has been making the AiW series for the last several years. Today's review will look at one of ATi's latest but not necessarily fastest All-in-Wonder video card.
