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 new 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 Elephant Atrium demo to determine potential framerates, using both 16 and 32-bit modes.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter tends to reward unadulterated processing power, and the results certainly follow this pattern. In 16-bit testing, the Xtasy GeForce4 MX 440 falls behind the pack, and even when moving to 32-bit mode, the situation doesn't improve dramatically. Even though the Xtasy GeForce4 MX 440 does finally overtake the GeForce2 Ti, check out the distance the GeForce3 Ti 200 puts between it and the GeForce4 MX 440.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Performance

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is another Quake engine game, but with some notable differences. The basic game engine may be the same, but the graphics, gameplay and the stress it puts on a 3D card are very different. Until the next Quake game appears, RtCW is the next best way to determine high-end Quake engine performance. We have employed the Checkpoint MP demo for our testing, using the default Normal (16-bit) and High Quality settings.

The Xtasy GeForce4 MX 440 actually puts in a good showing in our Return to Castle Wolfenstein benchmarking. It stays quite close to the GeForce3 Ti 200 and actually wins at two of the six test settings. Once we hit the higher resolutions, the top-end cards do break away, but the Xtasy GeForce4 MX 440 is easily superior to the GeForce2 Ti and even creates some real competition for the GeForce3 Ti 200.