Serious Sam 4 im Benchmark-Test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: With Serious Sam 4, the next monster hordes are just around the corner. The PC version comes with three APIs, because in addition to DX11, DX12 and Vulkan are also included. The test shows that an API has a clear lead. And also that the game needs a fast graphics card.

Serious Sam 4 was a difficult birth. After the third part, which was at most average, there was initially a long radio silence. After the announcement, Serious Sam 4 shifted several times, but now the first-person shooter is finally here. And the title leaves a decent impression. No, the fourth part didn’t turn out to be a top game, but it is definitely better than its predecessor. Especially fans of the still crazy series will have fun with the sheer mass of opponents.

Average graphic with lots of APIs

Serious Sam 4, unsurprisingly, uses the latest iteration of the Serious Engine, an in-house technology developed by Croteam. The technology has received some innovations, for example significantly more opponents can now be displayed on the screen at the same time (up to 100,000). Despite the improvements, the graphics quality is at best average. In some scenes, Serious Sam 4 can look pretty nice, especially with chic lighting and numerous particle effects. In others, however, the game is just a little ugly.

Especially when there is enough time to take a closer look at the surroundings, many poorly resolved textures are noticeable. In addition, numerous objects simply show few details – and often the surroundings are pretty sparse anyway. And the vegetation is also not an eye-catcher. There it is easy to see that Croteam is ultimately not a large development team and the budget is likely to be quite limited.

Where Croteam has let off steam with its own engine, on the other hand, are the APIs. Because Serious Sam 4 supports not just one or two, but three APIs. OpenGL is no longer available – but the engine was able to do that once – but instead, in addition to DirectX 11, the low-level APIs DirectX 12 and Vulkan. And with “Variable Rate Shading” an exclusive feature is also supported, albeit only on corresponding graphics cards (currently GeForce RTX 2000/3000) and only with DirectX 12.

Serious Sam has always had a massive graphics menu and that hasn’t changed with Serious Sam 4. As with the other parts, there are innumerable settings possible. This means that there is not just one graphics preset with several options, but three of them three: This is because CPU, GPU and VRAM options have “Lowest”, “Low”, “Medium”, “High” and “Ultra” “Each have their own setting options. If that’s not enough for you, you can configure the three menu items separately and let off steam. Serious Sam 4 easily offers more than 50 graphic options.

Serious Sam 4 has an incredible number of individual options, but the game almost completely dispenses with comfort functions. There is no FPS limiter, no up- or down-sampling, no sample screenshots and no information texts. A little less mass and instead a little more class would have done the graphics menu good, even if that certainly does not fit Serious Sam itself.

It gets classic with anti-aliasing

As usual for the game series, Serious Sam 4 offers FXAA as post-processing anti-aliasing as well as well-established MSAA in the levels 2 ×, 4 × and 8 ×. Since the FXAA has only a minor effect in the game and is especially useless for the vegetation, there is no way around MSAA in Ultra HD either. Quadruple MSAA is the mode of choice, regardless of the resolution, which costs a lot of performance, but provides usable image stability. Because the MSAA also smooths alpha test textures and thus also the vegetation.

But that doesn’t mean that it works too well, because even in 3840 × 2160 the image with four times the MSAA tends to flicker with some objects. The image stability is never high, but at least only slightly disturbing from WQHD. On the other hand, a certain unrest has to be accepted in Full HD.

AMD FidelityFX for more sharpness

Serious Sam 4 integrates AMD FidelityFX for the first time in the form of the re-sharpening filter. This works quite well in the game, as the image sharpness increases especially in low resolutions, but the image flickering does not increase visibly in the same breath. Accordingly, FidelityFX should be activated throughout, especially since the service costs are very low.

The test system and the benchmark scene

All of the following benchmarks were carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT (test), which is operated with the standard settings. The Asus ROG Strix B550-E Gaming (BIOS 0802) with the B550 chipset was installed as the mainboard, graphics cards can be controlled accordingly with PCIe 4.0. The CPU was cooled by a Noctua NH-D15S with a centrally installed 140 mm fan. 32 GB of memory (4 × 8 GB, single rank, DDR4-3600, 16-16-16-38, optimized secondary timings) were available to the processor. Windows 10 2004 with all updates was installed on an NVMe M.2 SSD with PCIe 4.0.

The Adrenalin 20.9.2 and the GeForce 456.55 were used as drivers. Both are not officially optimized for Serious Sam 4, at least officially.

Test sequence and settings

The 25-second test scene takes place on the “One for the Way” map and is one of the most demanding environments in the game. The test sequence shows a very high visibility, a lot of vegetation and a few buildings that push the frame rate down. Most of the time, Serious Sam 4 runs better. However, the frame rate sometimes drops even further in battles, although this cannot be tested reproducibly.

The ultra preset is used for the resolutions Full HD and WQHD, with 16-fold AF and FidelityFX being activated. For Ultra HD, the GPU options are switched back to the high preset, FidelityFX is active. The API Vulkan is used in the graphics card benchmarks.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks, frame times, game review and conclusion