The Quarry Dx12
Vernie Montagna
A potential disadvantage to being given pre-release access to a game to review is that a patch may change things. Well, a significant patched arrived and so I have to rewrite the bulk of this section. While it is possible there are other changes from the update that will impact the other sections as well, I barely have the time to redo this section, but I am reasonably confident the other sections will be fine. Even with this rewrite, there remains the issue that because I reviewed the game in its pre-release version, the bulk of the screenshots and my impressions will be based on that version.
The graphics of Serious Sam 4 are a little mixed, as there are locations it looks quite good, and there are locations that look very unnatural. What mostly sticks in my mind for the unnatural areas would be places where the ground would be almost completely flat and empty of anything like trees or buildings. It would just be completely empty, and while I have not had time to revisit any of these locations after the update, for now I am willing to believe they have not changed. One thing I did check was in one of the areas set in the French countryside, where there should be farms but many of the fields are such flat, empty locations. There are also some that do have crops growing in them, but to see just a section of the ground yellowed, suggesting there could be something growing there but nothing is, looks weird.
While there are starkly flat locations, there are also environments that are richly detailed and filled with content. An example of this would be a quarry you eventually enter, and while I am hardly a quarry expert, the walls show fractured layers of rock with details to the stone, and the ground does possess realistic variation to it. You can also look out over the same French countryside I mentioned and see the forest extend for what would believably be miles. You can also travel for miles and continue to see trees appear as the road keeps going. I am unsure how large that map is, but it is certainly large.
Still, I would say Serious Sam 4 is not one of those games that you can very often just stop, look around, and be amazed by the graphics. There are spots like that, but the game's environmental visuals are not quite that impressive for me. (It is also the case there was a bug or issue impacting texture quality while I played, but the update appears to have fixed that.) Where the game definitely looks good are the enemies and, as odd as this may sound, their death animations.
Each enemy appears to be very carefully crafted to be quite detailed, and considering how much time you will be looking at them, this would have been a very appropriate use of effort. Whether it is the Processed humanoid enemies, Kleer skeletons, or the massive Khnum, these are all quite detailed. Of course, the way you will want to see them the most is exploding into wisps of blood and gore, and, as disturbing as it might sound, such explosions looked really good to me. The bodies are not just becoming a red mist, and in many cases the bodies do not disappear with the explosion; they just lose all of their blood to the atmosphere.
Something else I noticed that actually somewhat impressed me, as I cannot remember seeing it in a game before, is a different kind of blood splatter from shooting or killing enemies. So often it seems to be like a small balloon of red paint was thrown at a wall to create the splatter, but here the sprays can resemble more of an arterial spray, from when the body is continuing to pump the blood out of a wound. Perhaps this is in other games, but I cannot say any came to mind when I first noticed it here. I also came to notice during the playthrough that this splatter seemed to be applied at times the red balloon burst would have been more appropriate, but that could be something changed by the update.
Like many games the enemies of Serious Sam 4 can fall apart into pieces when killed, at least when killed in certain ways, and this too was done quite well. I cannot remember the specific game, but I can remember one where if you watched closely enough, you could see the original enemy body replaced with a stack of meat pieces that would then fall according to the physics system. I never observed such an obvious transition here, and while this effect might not be completely realistic, it looked good and was a rather satisfying reward for the kill as well.
One graphics-related change made by the update concerns the animations for at least one melee attack, and unfortunately this is an example of the review playthrough videos being out of date. One of the things you can do when close enough to many enemies is initiate a melee attack to kill them instantly. While there is still the somewhat predictable issue of you stabbing the knife in the wrong location because the enemy's position is a bit off, the vampire enemy has an appropriate animation now. The attack is still to reach up and stab them in the heart, assuming this enemy keeps its heart in the same location as a human, but before the enemy model would be completely rigid, and you could see this. Now it appropriately moves above in reaction to the attack, not trying to counter it, but being aware the knife blade is coming towards it. It also looked like the model and/or textures for the enemy might have been more detailed, but that could be my imagination.
Before wrapping this section up I want to quickly touch on the fire and water you encounter in the game. Water is the more common of the two, and sadly when you are wading in it, the effect on the fluid is just generic ripples emanating from your location. I guess it is fair since Sam does not have legs, but I will still be impressed by games that appropriately disrupt fluids based on real human movements.
The fire in Serious Sam 4 looks decidedly better than the water, and though not the best fire I have seen, it is definitely up there. The flames have multiple colors to them, providing greater depth than just a blotch of yellow and then an orange or red border. The opacity of these layers also falls off nicely as you approach the edge of the fire, which is nice, but the really impressive part of that is how the wisps of flames that break off from the main body appear. For one thing, they are actually there, which is not the case in every video game fire, and here they have a nice form to them as they fade away. The one criticism I must give is the embers produced by the fires. I watched them because it seemed off, and these particles survived in the air for far longer than I would think is realistic. Perhaps the update has fixed that, as I have not checked, but that is how they appeared in the pre-release version.
When I played the game I was running the 20.4.2 drivers, because it was not long ago when I finally updated to Windows 10 2004 and I wanted to wait, so if I ran into issues I would know which update caused them. Between finishing the playthrough and receiving the update, I have updated to the newest drivers, and so those are what were used when I re-collected the performance data.
The way this game handles its graphical settings is a little unusual, as there are three levels instead of the two and sometimes one level of some games. When you open the Graphics menu, you will be presented with some settings, such as the API, window mode, and MSAA but if you go into the Performance menu, accessible directly from the Options menu or the Graphics Menu, you will see "CPU Speed," "GPU Speed," and "GPU Memory" listed, which have presets going from Lowest to Ultra. There is also an option to customize any of the settings in these groups, and I have all of them listed in the Options table.
For the review, I decided to work from the CPU Speed Ultra, GPU Speed High, and GPU Memory High presets. The Threadripper 1950X is still a powerful CPU, but the RX 580 is starting to show its age in modern games, which is why I went with High instead of Ultra for both GPU Speed and GPU Memory. As it turns out, those presets have seen some significant changes with the update, so some of what I learned during the Graphics Quality Analysis is no longer accurate. However, I still decided to collect performance data as though it were accurate, which meant collecting it not just for my Review configuration, but also a "Low+" configuration as I call it.
For the Review configuration, I started from the presets I gave earlier, but disabled certain effects by personal choice: Zoom Blur; Motion Blur; and Depth of Field. The other settings I left at the preset's configuration, though I do somewhat wish I had disabled FXAA as it does tend to soften the image. I will get to the Low+ configuration after going over the Review configuration data first. First I want to cover how I collected the data, which was to use the in-game benchmark tool with OCAT running in the background.
The in-game benchmark for Serious Sam 4 is significantly different from others as it does not follow a scripted course. Instead it applies an AI to the playable character and then actually plays the game for a set amount of time. Though some aspects of this gameplay will not be exactly like that of a human player, each run can and will be different from others, so the data is not synthetic. The reasons I choose to use the tool are that it removed the concern of death from a run, cutscenes are automatically skipped, and it is just so much easier. As you can see in the graphs and tables below, I recorded data for each of the three APIs in three locations, so I definitely wanted to make it a bit easier for myself.
Before and after the update, it remains true that Vulkan is the best performing API of the three. What you do not see here is that these statistics are far superior to what I got prior to the update, almost making the Low+ data unnecessary, but I still wanted it. In all three locations, Vulkan outperformed the APIs with greater average values and less time spent below 60 FPS. It might be possible for DirectX 12 to surpass it though, with Variable Rate Shading enabled, but that investigation will have to wait until the performance analysis I intend to do, as the RX 580 does not support the feature.
c80f0f1006