Serious Sam 2 Demo Performance
Croteam's recently gone gold shoot-em-up makes for a really fun demo if your bag is shooting the living mince out of everything that moves. Easy to benchmark, it looks great and has a HDR lighting option to boot. Attempts to use HDR with MSAA on ATI's hardware resulted in a blacked out 3D render with only the 2D UI and certain decal textures showing up. No good for benchmarking either, performance not doing well. Croteam look likely to issue a patch to fix the issue in due course. HDR only had rendering issues on the Radeon X1800 XT, so the results for that mode with no AA enabled were omitted too.
NVIDIA's hardware has the upper hand in this test, the X1800 XT unable to keep pace with it in the HEXUS custom recorded demo, played back via the inbuilt benchmarking feature.
At 1600x1200 the memory pressure becomes too much for the 256MiB GeForce, performance dropping off from strong showings at 1280x1024 and 1024x768. A 512MiB GeForce 7800 GTX would likely do very well here.
