Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950
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. It’s 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 in 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 are possible further fine-tuning which will make the game even more demanding, but we chose the “ultra” presets with only one extra higher GPU setting, to allow for testing beyond 1920×1080.
We test first at 2560×1600 resolution:
And now 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 570 trades blows with the GTX 480, the HD 5870 is a bit faster and the stock GTX 580 simply blasts past them all to place only slightly ahead of the HD 6970. However, the HD 6950 puts in a great showing and it passes the GTX 480 and the GTX 470. The older and weaker cards would clearly be struggling at our ultra settings.
Thanks for such an extensive and thorough review, great job! Really enjoyed it. Personally, I feel a little disappointed with 6970 performance, I guess I was expecting a match to GTX580, or better. I have a feeling a lot of people had similar expectations. Oh, well… can’t blame 580 for being a stronger card. But considering the super-competitive pricing point of the new AMD flagship (which also came as a big surprise) it’s safe to say that HD6970 is also a winner in it’s own weight category and will make a lot of gamers very happy.
I’m a bit disappointed, too. The GTX 570 currently has the better performance/price ratio but the 6900 series still offers great ratio…just not as good as GTX 570.
Many people will be pleased nonetheless
The settings pic on the GTA 4 page is missing.
Thank-you. There are still a few images that are still going to be uploaded.
The settings for GTA-IV are all at “high” and 100%.
Apologies for the delay; we had issues with our under-NDA images that stopped us from uploading any further images after the evaluation was published; the permissions were just fixed yesterday.
FIXED.
u should turn on the a.i catalyst to quality as its the default graphic settings for ati graphic cards.
No PC gamer should buy an expensive graphics card to run its IQ settings at less than High Quality.
We test Nvidia vs AMD *both* at High Quality settings. You can always lower the settings yourself and gain a bit more performance if you like.
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