Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Performance

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is a great sequel in the popular franchise and the benchmark portion is even better than the original. This new game not only puts the pressure on processors and 3D cards (especially at higher resolutions) but provides some excellent in-game demos in wide open spaces with tons of enemies. For our specific tests, we have used the in-game Elephant Atrium demo to determine potential framerates, at 1024x768x32-bit.

The benchmark chart tells the tale, and we once again maintain the status quo of the Pentium 4-2.53 GHz well in the lead, with the SiS 645DX speeding ahead of the platform pack.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Performance

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is another Quake-based game, but with some notable differences. The basic game engine may be the same, but the graphics, gameplay and stress it puts on a processor are very different. Until the next Quake game appears, RtCW is the next best way to determine high-end Quake engine performance. We have used the Checkpoint MP demo using the default High Quality detail settings and have upped the resolution to 1024x768.

The results in Return to Castle Wolfenstein are a bit closer that usual, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Though the actual margin of victory is smaller the rankings remain very consistent with past game benchmarks.