M@'s guide to tweaking Serious Sam (1 and Second Encounter)

Serious Sam and Serious Sam: SE (The Second Encounter) is easily one of my favourite 3D shooters of all time, if not the favourite shooter. Serious Sam Gold is now available which combines both games in a cheap retail package. The game is fast, fluid and bloody (though, occasionally the blood in question is, well, green).
The action is to die for (literally, try fending off 500 of those Klear Skeleton thingies at once and see how you get on) and the engine is superb, even on older graphics cards (works well on a Geforce 2 and below).
This guide aims both to tweak for optimal performance on a system but also for optimal beauty. It presupposes a system with a decent amount of ram (512MB or higher) but any speed of video card, plus any CPU from P3 800mhz upwards.
I spent a long, long time finding the best settings for this game, so take my advice as written-

See what I mean?

Basics -

You can avoid these steps if you've already optimised your system and/or graphics card drivers, or if your graphics card is fairly grunty (i.e Radeon 9500 pro or higher):
1. Optimise the bejesus out of your system. Tons of guides on this around so just Google it-
2. Overclock the hell out of your video card (use rivatuner and hotkey it) - only do this if you know what you're doing, and know the risks involved.
3. *For old Nvidias*: Drivers are not so much an issue for this game, as it works with the directx 8 graphics line.
However, should you choose to change drivers for this game, I recommend going for the v29.80 detonators (for whatever flavour of windows you have) - these seem to give the best performance for this game. For newer drivers, Nvidia no longer supports geforce 2's and many other old cards in their drivers. I expect this to continue and for the unsupported graphics card range to increase with time. However, omega drivers don't have this constraint - download and install the most recent 'performance' nvidia omega driver.
Set performance settings to 'high performance' in the nvidia tweak menu. Then go into the nvidia control panel under control panel/display/settings tab/advanced button/Geforce tab. Go to Performance and Quality settings and change vertical sync to 'off'. Then go to the 'refresh rate overrides' and change the refresh rate for 800x600 to your monitor's optimal (maximum) refresh rate (85hz & upwards is best).
5. Set antialiasing to '2x', or higher if you've got a reasonably grunty graphics card - no antialiasing looks bad...
6. Set anisotropy to 'off' - again, unless you've got a reasonably grunty graphics card - doesn't make a huge visual difference IMHO anyway, and reduces performance quite significantly.

Tweaking Serious Sam itself

1. Install and update the game to the most recent patch (1.07 for Serious Sam SE, 1.23 or something for Serious Sam 1). Do NOT install the beta 'newer' patch for either - it degrades graphics performance horribly, and looks dreadful.
2. Under the options/video submenu, change your resolution to either 800x600x32 (for older graphics cards) or 1048x768x32 or higher for a grunty card. Don't bother with 16-bit. Set graphics mode to OpenGL (runs alright, but much more slowly, under Direct3D) and preferences to "Quality".
3. Under the options/video/'advanced' submenu, do the following:

• Texture size: Large.
• Texture quality: Optimal.
• Detail textures: Enabled.
• Shadowmap size: Normal
• Lens Flares: Standard
• Gamma Correction: Normal
• Wait vertical retrace: No
• Wide screen: Off.

4. Go to the options/advanced/advanced rendering options submenu (ignore the advanced prediction options submenu - only relates to multiplayer) and do the following settings:

Texture settings:

• Normal size: large
• Animation size: normal
• Effect size: normal
• Normal quality: Optimal
• Effect quality: 16-bit
• Filtering method: Sharpen (2 spaces left of 'none')
• Effect filtering method: low (halfway)
• Filtering booster: Disabled
• Fithering method: Low diffusion

Shadow map settings:

• Size: normal
• Quality: 16-bit
• Filtering method: medium
• Dithering method: minimum
• Cache size: Huge
• Precache shadowmaps: Yes

Model settings:

• LOD quality: supreme
• Shadow type: Simple (change higher for grunty graphics cards)
• Precision: normal (again, higher for grunty graphics card)
• Detail textures: Enable
• Specularity: Enable
• Reflection mapping: Enable

Rendering control:

• Multi-texturing mode: (leave as whatever it currently is - this should be the optimal choice for your card)
• Texture rendering method: Trilinear
• Texture anisotropy: None (or higher, if you've got a decent vidcard)
• Texture LOD bias: Sharpen (two up from middle ('none'))
• 16-bit color dithering: High
• Truform/N-patches: if this setting is available, turn it on- otherwise don't worry about it
• Use tru-form/N-patches: only for tryform-ready models

OpenGL settings:

• Texture compression system: S3TC (or lower if your system doesn't support this scheme - you can also use 'none' if you've got heaps of video memory and a fast card)
• Optimise rendering: Enabled for everything
• Access mode: Performance

Direct3D Settings:

• T&L usage: Hardware
• T&L buffer size: large
• Faster Lens Flares: No

HUD settings:

• Size: small
• Opacity: 75% or 50% (according to taste, really)
• Crosshair opacity: High

Display settings: Leave alone

Additional settings:

• Environmental particles density: High (this looks best- trust me)
• Environmental particles range: Maximum (again - looks better)
• Lens flare rendering: Complete
• Screen refresh rate: (highest your system can support, I recommend 85hz or higher)
• Grab z-buffer: No
• Pretouch memory: Yes

5. Well that's it - Play!
I never get slowdowns on my P4 and geforce 2, with these settings, and am constantly amazed at the quality and action of the gameplay.

More screenshots:

Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4

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disclaimer: If anything explodes, it's not my fault-