Video shows updated Serious Sam with raytracing support and HD textures

The classic PC game Serious Sam - The First Encounter (from US$5 on Amazon) from 2001 is still popular among a very dedicated group of fans. Because the game's technical foundation has not aged particularly well in the past 20 years, a few hardworking fans have taken on the task of overhauling the graphic's engine of the iconic first-person shooter.

The result of their work is a fan-made update, which is available as a free download on Github. The upgrade greatly enhances the graphics and visuals of Serious Sam, as a new video by Digital Foundry shows. In addition to sharper high-resolution textures, the update enables stunning ray traced, or path traced, illumination and lighting effects in the game. Those effects, which are discussed in detail in the aforementioned video, turn the original Serious Sam into a much more beautiful game.

In very dark catacombs, the new illumination seems so realistically pitch-dark that the developers of the fan update even decided to integrate a flashlight into the game, which leads to a rather different gaming experience. Apart from that change, the update keeps Serious Sam's original art style intact, which means that it should still feel like the good old shooter from 2001. The only downside to this interesting update are the massively increased hardware requirements of the game, which are also discussed and analyzed in the video that is embedded under this article.