Serious Sam Performance

Serious Sam is an interesting 3D first-person shooter that also offers some innovative and detailed benchmarking tools. For our specific tests, we have used the in-game Memphis demo to determine potential framerates, using both 16 and 32-bit modes.

The trends we witnessed with Quake 3 continue in Serious Sam benchmarking, but actually get a bit worse for the RADEON 8500. In basic 16-bit testing, the low-rez power of the GeForce3 is simply too much and it isn't until 1600x1200 that things start to equalize. Since video clock speed seems to mean a great deal to 16-bit Serious Sam benchmarking (witness the GeForce2 ULTRA beating the GeForce3 Ti 200) we expected the RADEON 7500 to really impress. Unfortunately, it hits the wall once again and finished at the bottom of the pack.

The situation really doesn't change much for the RADEON 8500 when moving to higher-detail, 32-bit settings, but the RADEON 7500 does make a better showing at the higher settings by matching the GeForce2 ULTRA at 1600x1200 and surpassing the GeForce2 Ti.