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Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter Demo next. We use the OpenGL renderer and maximum quality settings as first used way back in our NV25 reference card results.
What we are expecting here, given the application doesn't use shaders, is a close fight with the Xabre edging NV17 out. Let's see how things pan out.
Again, ignore the NV25 comparison results since they are clearly quicker than the Xabre and NV17 results and take a close look at the two slower cards. What we see here is Serious Sam 2 treating both cards identically, using the same number of rendering passes and running pretty much identically on both cards. The driver issue we saw with Quake3, another OpenGL application, doesn't rear it's head here and things are pretty much neck and neck.
Given a driver revision or two (badly needed for some apps as we'll see soon), Xabre should win in all resolutions over NV17.
Lastly in our look at the cards performance, we have Comanche 4. If you remember back to the driver discussion earlier in the review, you'll recall that Xabre does pretty horribly in Comanche 4. Even with a 2.4B and DDR333 behind it, the card seriously struggles especially during the scene transitions.
As you can see at 1024x768, NV17 is ~194% quicker than Xabre and while it gets better as the resolution is increased when the cards are made to work harder, NV17 is king. The key is in the scene transitions where Xabre just chokes and drops to single figure framerates.
The Xabre is a massive margin behind NV17 in Comanche 4 and it's down to the driver. Hopefully it can be cured as soon as possible since the hardware is certainly capable of giving NV17 a fight here and it's certainly not ~46% slower than NV17 in any other benchmark we tested.
A win for NV17 in Comanche 4 but I think a result of interference by the Xabre driver team and a rematch to be scheduled soon should be called!
Lets discuss performance as a whole and then onto a final conclusion.
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