Serious Sam: Second Encounter (SS:SE)

Finally we'll take a look at the performance of the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra under the OpenGL title Serious Sam: Second Encounter (SS:SE). In this instance we'll be using a custom benchmark demo recorded by Firing Squad.

SS:SE (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
5800 Ultra 149.4 144.5 134.2 105.2 79.7
5900 Ultra 149.7 145.2 137.0 108.6 82.5
Diff from 5800 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
FPS 0.3 0.7 2.8 3.4 2.8
% 0% 0% 2% 3% 4%

Like RtCW, SS:SE is also a fixed function texture rendering title, but in this instance the 5900 Ultra has the upper hand slightly, suggesting this may be a little more bandwidth limited. The performance difference, however, is only at a maximum of 4% and the 5900 rendered above 100 FSP on average all the way up until 1280x1024.

5900 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Normal 149.7 145.2 137.0 108.6 82.5
8x AF 149.7 141.7 112.8 83.3 62.8
4XFSAA 143.7 139.3 123.3 90.2 66.6
8x AF + 4X FSAA 144.9 130.0 99.5 70.5 51.5
% Difference from Normal 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
8x AF 0% -2% -18% -23% -24%
4XFSAA -4% -4% -10% -17% -19%
8x AF + 4X FSAA -3% -10% -27% -35% -38%

SS:SE can utilise up to 5 texture layers per pass, and so it's not much of a surprise that utilising 8x Anisotropic Filtering would incur a reasonably large performance penalty, with up to a 24% performance drop. In this case the average rendering performance is above 100 FPS at 1024x768 and a little above 60 FPS at 1600x1200.

Using 4X FSAA here actually has a slightly smaller performance penalty than using 8x AF, with the maximum performance hit being 19%. With both 4X FSAA and 8x AF enabled the maximum performance penalty raises to 38%, with the performance over 60 FPS at 1280x1024, but dropping below it at 1600x1200.