ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Croteam's Serious Sam
http://www.croteam.com

The Croatian-based Croteam has recently released the second public test of their upcoming first-person shooter: Serious Sam.  This test actually has quite a powerful benchmarking engine in it.  The OpenGL game not only outputs the average frame rate but also outputs the sustained high and sustained low frame rate numbers during the course of the demo playback. 

The plethora of settings in the test were left at their defaults with the exception of resolution and color depth.  The built in 'Coop Party 04' demo was used to measure performance.

Regardless of what driver revision we used under Windows 2000, the Radeon would completely lock up during the benchmarking of the card.  It isn't a compatibility problem between the game and the Radeon because it worked just fine and performed quite well under Windows 98. 

It is worth noting that this is a very early test version of the game but in spite of that, NVIDIA's drivers perform just as well as they do under Windows 98 while ATI's prevent the card from even completing the benchmark under Windows 2000.

Let's hope that this problem is corrected before the shipping version of Serious Sam hits the streets.