Serious Sam

Serious Sam is a relatively new title, but it's already proven to be a favourite amongst the benchmarkers, probably because of the level of configurability is has. One thing that Serious Sam also includes is support for more than 2 texture units per pipeline, which should be helpful for KYRO's 8 layer texturing ability.

As we can see from the graphs this system begins being farily CPU limited, but then after 1024x768 goes to being 3D bandwidth limited. We can tell that KYROII is bandwidth limited, and not fillrate limited, because the FSAA performance is very level. Presumably this is bandwidth limited because of the high texturing demands on the game; Dean Sekulic, Programmer / Designer for Croteam has said on our forums that Serious Sam uses 3 texture layers, a shadow map plus fog/haze, averaging 5 texture layers.

The performance drop from 16bit rendering to 32bit isn't too great either, but then considering it seems that texture bandwidth is more of the issue this is probably no great surprise. Once again FSAA is showing less of a performance degradation than its increased fillrate requirements would show, but being bandwidth limited in the first place with KYRO's FSAA mechanism we would expect this.

The performance differential between KYRO Vivid! and KYROII Vivid!XS once again shows the clear speed increase KYROII obviously has. However, on this occasion KYROII sticks much closer to its actual performance advantage than previously (52%); again I would have to suggest that this is due to the increased bandwidth of KYROII, over KYRO.