Serious Sam is a relatively new game and is, in my mind, one of the best games around now. Its single player missions are very interesting and challenging to play through, and it's "co-operative" multiplaying mode provides one of the most addicting multiplayer experiences around.

It's stunning graphics and special effects also makes this game an ideal benchmark for video cards. After running a few preliminary tests, I found that running the game using the "Quality" graphics setting provides the best ability to scale resolutions. Below are one of the few benchmarks published on the web utilizing Serious Sam and, you'll be sure that we'll be using more and more of this benchmark in the future.

The results from running Serious Sam under 640x480 resolution shocked me as much as it might shock you. Although not this apparent with the Quake III: Arena results seen before, the Radeon VE actually lagged behind both the GeForce2 MX400 and also the nearly-3-year-old TNT2 Pro. Even the Radeon VE's superior 32-bit performance that we saw throughout this review couldn't help it out. Now I see why ATI has not marketed this card as a gaming card like most of the other products in the Radeon family, but as a dual-monitor solution only...

At 800x600, the results are a tad bit less uglier for the Radeon VE since the much older TNT2 Pro only has an ever so small lead on the Radeon VE at both 16-bit and 32-bit resolutions. Unfortunately, the fact remains that the couple-month-old Radeon VE is being beaten by a couple-year-old video card. We should expect the Radeon VE to pull ahead of the TNT2 Pro at a higher resolution now...

...and pull ahead it shall! These results are at least becoming favourable to the Radeon VE, but they're still not pretty. The Radeon VE pulls ahead of the TNT2 Pro in 32-bit (by 0.1-FPS), but still lags behind in the 16-bit department.

Finally, we see that the Radeon VE pulls ahead of the TNT2 Pro in all areas--of course, the fact that the TN2 Pro was unable to finish this test could have been a factor. The GeForce2 MX400 continues to have a commanding lead; however, it drops below the 30-FPS threshold itself.

On to: Conclusion