The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)

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 default “ultra” presets.

We test first at 1680×1050 resolution:

Our settings are way too high for our cards so we test at 1280×720 and now with the low presets:

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD on the Serious 3 engine is quite demanding . The GT 520 is solidly faster than the HIS HD 6450 although the GDDR5 version beats the overclocked Galaxy GT 520.