Serious Sam 3: BFE Performance and IQ Review @ [H]

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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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Hey Brent, what level did you guys test with? If I were to guess from the stills. Under the Iron Cloud. Correct?

Try doing a quick test of "The Guardian of Time" set to Serious.
 
I am slow. lol

Yep, last level. What difficulty? The higher difficulty, the more enemies, this includes "Mental".
 
Thanks for the comparison guys, good work. I've been using sli in this game for a bit and from what I've seen it works great but I haven't been around any water? I know that in serious sam hd sli causes negative scaling whenever you are around water, is this completely fixed in SS3?
 
There should be water around the stage "Last man on Earth". Helicopter crash site.
 
Now what is more important as a micro-metric? Maximum resolution or Maximum in-game settings? I was hoping to see the maximum resolution that one would get if running everything at ultra in-game settings. This comment holds especially true for the "budget" cards 560ti and 6870. I know I can sorta extrapolate that I could run ultra at 1680x1050 given it could run high at 2560 res.

I'm just curious as to your thoughts on that part of the testing metric.

I did like the article though.
 
XamediX said:
Now what is more important as a micro-metric? Maximum resolution or Maximum in-game settings? I was hoping to see the maximum resolution that one would get if running everything at ultra in-game settings. This comment holds especially true for the "budget" cards 560ti and 6870. I know I can sorta extrapolate that I could run ultra at 1680x1050 given it could run high at 2560 res.

I'm just curious as to your thoughts on that part of the testing metric.

I did like the article though.
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Grady noted several times throughout the article that resolution did not play a role in the settings.
From page 3:

Since the Max 3D Rendering MPIX is basically your effective resolution, changing your in-game screen resolution has no real effect on performance.
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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570's performance at 1920x1200 was within 1 average FPS of its performance at 2560x1600. This occurs on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. It does allow the less powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti and AMD Radeon HD 6870 to play at 2560x1600 without suffering a performance loss. It also makes testing for us a bit difficult.
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From page 5:
Since resolution does not affect performance in Serious Sam 3: BFE the apples-to-apples and highest playable settings are effectively the same for both video cards.
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This would indicate that maximum in-game settings is more important.
 
SS3 is like the only FPS game I've played that makes my eyeballs go wonky when I play it. I've played tons of FPS games and tons of other games.

Any ideas what I should tweak?
 
figgie said:
I am slow. lol

Yep, last level. What difficulty? The higher difficulty, the more enemies, this includes "Mental".
Click to expand...

In the "mental" difficulty, there does not appear to be anymore enemies that I can tell. The enemies turn invisible, then visible every 1/2 second or so.

I find this rather annoying. If I wanted to play with The Force, I'd play a Star Wars game.

I just play on "serious" difficulty. I'm going to look for some mods that let me play on "serious", but let me hold as much ammo as I find.
 
Devistater said:
SS3 is like the only FPS game I've played that makes my eyeballs go wonky when I play it. I've played tons of FPS games and tons of other games.

Any ideas what I should tweak?
Click to expand...

Sounds like the default fov is too low for you. I felt the same way.
 
Thanks for the detailed write up. So, it appears that gameplay overall is smoother for SLI users versus crossfire users, despite the higher fps for crossfire users. Is this because of poor drivers from the AMD side or does it simply boil down to SLI just being superior to crossfire in general?

Oh, and found an error. ;) On page five, underneath the first chart:

The AMD Radeon HD 6870 CFX performed 11.7 average FPS or 13% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 SLI.
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The highlighted text above should be 6970. :)
 
Great review. I like it very much like all game reviews from H.
Croteam did very good Job with SS3. Super AA brings my MSI gtx 580 Light. Extreme to knees, under 20fps.
 
Really good game for me, I've enjoyed the hell out of playing it and will play it many more times. From what I've seen on forums I would have liked to have seen more playing it. Seems a lot of people won't even try it for whatever reasons. It's their loss.
 
Surprised SSAA didn't look that good. Thought it would be a big difference.
 
A lovely and most useful article. But could you please teach the author that 's is the possessive or genitive, and not the plural?
 
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