EVGA’s GTX 550 Ti “free performance” evaluation
Serious Sam Second Encounter HD (2010) 
Serious Sam is the title of a series of first-person shooters created by the Croatian development team Croteam. It follows the adventures of its hero Sam “Serious” Stone and his fight against the forces of the extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy humanity. Its gameplay is a throwback to early first-person shooters like Quake and Doom with the twist of being set in wide-open environments with large groups of enemies attacking at any time, and there are many hidden areas and treasures to find and puzzles to solve.
Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay and allows for split screen action supporting up to 4 players. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was remade as “HD” using Serious Engine 3. It was released on April, 2010 for PC. Besides updated visuals, new game modes including “Co-op Tournament” and “Survival” for single player, were introduced in this remake.
We use the basic 3 “ultra” presets for benching Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD. There is possible further fine-tuning which will make the game even more demanding, but we chose the “ultra” presets with only one higher GPU setting, to allow for testing beyond 1920×1080.
We test first at 2560×1600 resolution:
And finally at 1920×1200 with the same ultra presets:
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD on the Serious 3 engine is quite demanding . Although the GTX 560 Ti trades blows with the HD 6870, the HD 6950 is a bit faster and the stock GTX 550 Ti is solidly faster than the HD 5770 and an excellent upgrade replacement for the GTX 450.
I am just getting around to it but i must say very nice review apoppins! As always your vast selection of games and benchmarks is top notch. Its so complete. I know you used it a lot, but I wouldve liked to have seen 1680 x 1050 results for every game. You may have only skipped it when the 550ti was doing very well at 1920×1200 and thats fine. But i feel like 1680×1050 is intended for this card and although at times it can obviously do well at higher resolutions, the 1680×1050 should be the starting point in all the test.
Dont get me wrong, your review was great. I just think cards intended for a certain resolution often get reviewed in much higher resolutions which doesnt do them much justice. Your review does do the 550ti justice though, its very full and useful.
Thank-you!
Again, the reason for leaving 1680×1050 out came down to time. Or a lack of it.
I did try to compensate by finding settings that approached playability and I hope we can revisit the GTX 550 Ti in another article. I did some further testing of the GTX 550 Ti in the HD 6670/6570 launch article, in fact.
Galaxy is sponsoring our May contest – the prizes will include a GTX 550 Ti and a GTX 560 Ti.