Date:
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Serious Sam 3: BFE Performance and IQ Review

Croteam's latest installment in the Serious Sam series takes us back to a time when first person shooters were designed around fragging endless waves of zombified enemies, cover did not exist, and rocket launchers were semi-automatic weapons. This DX9 game comes packed with graphics options that push the current generation of graphics cards to the limit.

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.

Test System Setup

We will be using a MSI Eclipse SLI X58 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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All drivers are indicated for use with the Windows 7 x64 operating system.

AMD - For all AMD based video cards in this evaluation, we are using AMD's Catalyst 11.12 WHQL driver package, dated 13 December 2011, and AMD's 11.12 Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) Version 1 dated 15 December 2011.

NVIDIA - For all NVIDIA-based video cards in this evaluation, we are using ForceWare 290.36 BETA driver package, dated 28 November 2011. There is no increased performance or SLI profile for Serious Sam 3: BFE with this driver.