Publisher Web Site: www.godgames.com
Serious Sam Web Site: www.serioussam.com
Cost: $0 to $20
The good folks over at GodGames (the Gathering of Developers) brought us Serious Sam, a no-frills yet still fun-to-play first-person shooter that offers some good graphics, decent single-play, and fun multiplay. And along with the actual game came the Serious Sam Public Tests. The first, Public Test 1, tested single-player mode, while Public Test 2 also tested the multiplay. So those of you who don't want to spring $10-20 for the game (though I recommend you do) can download the 72MB Public Test 2 from their web site.
As with Quake3, you will want to change the resolution and depth that the test runs at. Once you have done so, use the tilde key (~) to get to the console and type the following:
At that point, it is easiest to leave the console and use the game menu to go to 'Demos' and load the demo you would like to use to test. Once it has been running for a while, you can go to the console and type the following two commands.
- /ReportDemoProfile()
- /DumpDemoProfile()
The first will give you a report on your screen; the second will dump the results to a text file named DemoProfile.1st, which you will find in the '/temp' subdirectory in the directory where you installed Serious Sam.
Publisher Web Site: www.vulpine.de/en/index.shtml
Vulpine GLMark Web Site: www.vulpine.de/en/index.shtml
Cost: $0
Vulpine has developed a demo of their OpenGL game engine that has been getting adopted, by some reviewers, as an OpenGL benchmarking tool. Using it is about as easy as it gets. When you launch the demo, you will find yourself at a settings screen that lets you set it up the test however you like. Once you have it set up, just click on 'Run Benchmark' and it will do the rest.
When the test is complete, you will get a results window that not only reports your FPS< but gives you a handy graph of how the rate fluctuated throughout the test, as well as a means of comparing your system's performance to some common setups.
This guide, of course, is far from comprehensive, as we could never list every test out there. But it should serve as a good start for someone looking to see how his/her system and video card stack up against the ones being reviewed on sites like Sharky Extreme. Future guides will offer similar introductions to benchmarking drives and CPU's, as was mentioned above. So head on over to SharkyForums and let us know what you would like to see more or less of in guides of this type.
Housen Maratouk
Managing Editor