Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem

I re-played all Serious Sams a couple of years ago. And I found that the First and Second Encounters are still the most fun the saga ever was.
SS3 was also fun, but the first couple of hours are a bit boring. But eventually it finds it stride and becomes good fun. And it's DLC was also very good.
SS2 was a pain to play and I gave up on it.
Las year I played SS4 and it was fun for the most part. But it had some technical issues and some parts seemed unfinished.

 

Sam 4 suffered from internal issues.
The person that had been the lead technical engineer for the entirety of Croteam's Serious Sam series... left the company during 4's development.
Before the engine was finished.

So, they lost the person who did the most of their magic, code wise. And they struggled to fill the spot.


I've replayed the series in recent years, and honestly I find TFE kind of boring. Partially due to it's limited enemy roster, it's level design... and in general, I don't feel they really had fully grasped the "flow" of Serious Sam at that point.
It definitely improved in TSE, but there are parts of the game I don't enjoy much.

Most fans dislike 3 because of it's departure from some elements. But, it's a solid game and one I like a lot.
And, even more impressive... 3 was developed by a 15 person team.

 

I like Sam4 but it runs so bad for me (still) it's off putting.

 

Vulkan has some serious stuttering but dx11 runs well for most part. Having crazy number of enemies on the screen performance will suffer. Croteam didnt put alot work optimizing it but game is not unplayable especially on such beast as 6800xt.

 

Open the console in game and enter these commands.
This will disable texture streaming and make everything much better, if you have enough vram and ram.

 

That's the thing, the game runs no better now than with 2070. It seems to be CPU limited without the CPU being nearly maxed.
Also Ryzen 5000 seems to get a massive boost in Sam 4 so older Ryzens aren't optimal for the game ig.

I'll try @Horus-Anhur 's suggestion if I ever replay the game.

 

Also I saw no real performance difference between DX11, 12 or Vulkan.
DX11 seemed a little smoother at first but once shader compiling or asset streaming was done they were virtually identical.

 

You have any idea how much more RAM this consumes versus streaming?
VRAM I have plenty I'm sure (16 GB)

 

I have 16Gb of ram and 8GB of vram. And it runs very well.
So if you have more, it will run as well, or better.

 

Danke, have 16 GB RAM as well.

 

Game did use all of my vram with video memory options maxed out. My problem was like @AsiJu mentioned the cpu. Game was not utilizing half of my threads and 2700x was struggling with it.

 

Try to use this command to set how many threads the game uses.
But be careful, if you increase too many threads, it might add more stuttering.
So you have to experiment with a few values to find the best for you.

thr_iMaxWorkerThreads = X

 

That tweak I did try and made no difference for me, at least.

 

What about the ones for streaming?

 

I mean, if I was able to find some settings that allowed smooth FPS...
Then others definitely should be able to.

There's not much difference between a lot of the settings.

 

Performance in SS4 is all over the place, mostly in dense city scapes where the engine just dies and every camera movement causes hitches. There's an area in literally 2nd level which can choke the engine and then also some of the later town levels in the France section of the game.
IIRC some community dissection also revealed some assets to be unreasonable texture-poly wise which contributes to poor performance in high density areas but they never had a time to get a pass over them (along with horrid interior lighting) since over a year now.

 

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem PC System Requirements
MINIMUM:

• • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • Processor: 4-core CPU @ 2.5 GHz
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: nVidia GeForce 780/970/1050 or AMD Radeon 7950/280/470 (3 GB VRAM)
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 25 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: Requirements are based on 720p rendering resolution at 30 FPS

RECOMMENDED:

• • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit (1909)
  • Processor: 8-core CPU @ 3.3 GHz
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: nVidia GeForce 1080/2060 or AMD Radeon Vega64/5700 (8 GB VRAM)
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 25 GB available space

Steam page

Release date: 25 January 2022

 

And here is the steam page
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1792250/Serious_Sam_Siberian_Mayhem
No price at the moment

 

This feels super weird to be honest, i hope it wasn't the case that whatever was left of the team for SS4 was pulled to aid third party in making another standalone game and in the end having both equally broken technically or perhaps only the newer product "fixed" whilst they get back to fixing the "base" game after 6 months of nobody being assigned to it.