Croteam has announced that "Serious Santa" is bringing discounts to the Serious Sam games on Xbox Live Marketplace. Serious Sam 3: BFE, the Serious Sam 3: Jewel of the Nile DLC pack, and both Serious Sam HD: The First and Second Encounters will be 50% off for the holiday season at 600 Microsoft Points.
The games will include some special Santa themes as well. "Gamers will be also be able to crank up the holiday cheer with custom Santa-themed skins in the legendary madness of Serious Sam campaign co-op and a variety of white-knuckle multiplayer versus modes," according to the press release.
Despite launching back in 2011, Serious Sam 3: BFE is playable on all modern formats. But is it still worth your time?
Digital Foundry : Serious Sam is a classic PC shooter that's celebrating its 20th birthday this year - and software engineer 'sultim-t' has delivered a fully path-traced mod, similar to Quake 2 RTX. So how does it look and how well does it run? Alex checks it out.
Again, sure there are scenes where path racing looks realistic, but I just don’t know if it really looks better. And most of all, is it worth it everything considered (performance hit, heat and power consumption increase, hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game.)
"is it worth it everything considered ... hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game."
Because path tracing for a game with more polygons, details, and effects will result a nearly unplayable state of that game using even an RTX 3090, tanking the performance greatly.
Path tracing is freaking expensive calculation. Nvidia's own Marbles demo ran at 1440p@30 with DLSS 2.0 enabled.
Hence the path tracing experimentation is carried out in less detailed games like Quake II and Serious Sam, to analyze the final result, appreciate the said technology and still able to play it at a reasonable framerate.
Thanks for the comment. I completely understand why path tracing is so expensive and used in these low end games to show it off. To me, it simply shows how far we still are from any reasonable implementation of RT in games. I think realistically we can talk about ray tracing for consoles when PS6 and XSX2 releases in 2026-2027, or for PC when RTX 5000 - RX 8000 series are out in 2025-2026. That's when it becomes somewhat realistic, because we have to remember the rasterization requirements go up, and the reflections required also go up in parallel.
Meanwhile, I think the best bang for buck for highend is 6800xt OC'd 10% with MPT. I've got a 6900xt, and I run it raster 4K60 all maxed out, and when it doesn't run a stable 60fps, I can scale resolution down 10-20% or use FSR ultra quality or quality and it looks very good still. Ray tracing..? Not a chance, it's just a gimmick, and am not interested in it. Sure, it looks more realistic, but my question is, does it really look better? I mean better in most gamers eyes, not better in technically savvy analysts eyes who know what a scene should look like. Because there's a massive difference between those subjective and objective views. I actually like often baked lighting and reflections better, because they seem to be what the original artists were going for.
I really like this new lighting and metalish looks. Hopefully it just gets better and better. Btw, 20 years of Serious Sam development, damn. That's huge for not that big developer team.
Serious Sam: The First Encounter Ray Traced is a port of the classic first person game powered by a reworked engine that supports ray tracing.
