Galaxy’s GTX 560 Ti GC – Introducing Nvidia’s Titanium Hunter
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. Serious Sam 3 is currently in development by Croteam and is expected to debut at E3, 2011. 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 and yet all of our top configurations play it satisfactorily using the game’s built-in “ultra” presets. Although the GTX 560 Ti trades blows with the HD 6870, the HD 6950 is a bit faster and the stock GTX 580 simply blasts past them all. However, even the HD 6850 puts in a good showing and it is sufficient to play this game at 1920×1200 although the GTX 280 and the GTX 460-768MB would be struggling.
Waaah! this was one amazing review, excellent job Poppin!
I’m already thinking of upgrading my system 😛
fantastic review gives out the Clear picture which gives out what and there is no Bias of favoring nvidia or ati like we get to see on other sites
great work done !!
Hey, another stellar review–glad to see even more games. You continue to lead the web with by far the most games benchmarked.
Just curious about the Mafia II 2560×1600 results, where GTX 570 is much, much slower than GTX 480.. was it an accident with using different settings, or is it a glitch with newer drivers?
Thank-you!
In Mafia II, the GTX 570 (266.58) and the GTX 480 (263.09) are using different drivers and should not be directly compared to each other. Generally, the brand new GeForce driver set evenly brought overall excellent performance increases over the last set – but with a couple of oddities in my system.
There were three instances (out of 64 benchmarks) where the GTX 570 failed to perform as expected and where I repeated the benchmarks many times and checked and rechecked settings. I would guess that they are driver-related since they did not show in the earlier driver set.
Of course, it is possible that a resolution setting got accidentally changed between the time that I ran the first set and last weeks testing so I will retest these same benches over again. In my follow up article which is going to pit SLI versus CrossFire, we shall use the (same) latest drivers for GTX 480 and GTX 570 (for single and SLI results).
It was a resolution setting. I tested the GTX 480 at 1920×1200, not at 2560×1600. The charts have been corrected and only the competing cards tested with the very latest driver set are compared now.
Thank-you for bring this error to my attention!
“we found the GTX 460 to be just a bit cooler-running than our GTX 460”
Thank-you. Typo Fixed.
“We found the GTX 560 Ti to be just a bit cooler-running than our GTX 460.”
Article word count: 13,316 😛
“And now we test at 1920×1200:”
You then put the graph for 1680×1050 😉