Serious Sam SE
In order to test Serious Sam on a more-or-less level playing field, we used Serious Sam's "Extreme Quality" add-on to set graphics options. For the most part, that will mean the graphics settings are comparable from card to card, with one exception. The Radeon cards are doing 16X anisotropic filtering here, and the NVIDIA cards are at their maximums of 8X aniso. However, with the adaptive aniso algorithm that ATI uses, the difference between 8X aniso and 16X aniso is very minor.

The GeForce FX blows away the Radeon cards here, averaging about 20 fps faster at everything but the lowest resolution.

Serious Sam lets us look at actual performance over time rather than just averages, so let's see what we can see. One thing to look for: performance dips. In many ways, the quality of the gaming experience is defined by what happens in the worst-case scenarios.

The GeForce FX's dominance isn't adequately captured by its average scores. At 1600x1200, the FX is so fast, its performance low-points are higher than the previous-gen GeForce4's performance peaks.

With 4X AA plus 8X aniso, the FX's performance lead narrows, but remains intact. Let's look at the performance over time.

Again, the FX shows impressive strength across the board.