DX11: Unigine Heaven 2.1

The Unigine "Heaven 2.1" benchmark is a free publicly available tool that grants the power to unleash the graphics capabilities in DirectX-11 for Windows 7 or updated Vista Operating Systems. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode, emerging experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extend and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming.

The distinguishing feature in the Unigine Heaven benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand. The "Heaven" benchmark excels at providing the following key features:

• Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX-10 and DirectX-11
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• ATI Eyefinity support

Although Heaven-2.1 was recently released and used for our DirectX-11 tests, the benchmark results were extremely close to those obtained with Heaven-1.0 testing. Since only DX11-compliant video cards will properly test on the Heaven benchmark, only those products that meet the requirements have been included.

Cost Analysis: Unigine Heaven (1680x1050)

Test Summary: Our test results with the Unigine Heaven benchmark tool appear to deliver fair comparisons of DirectX-11 graphics cards. The 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 clears past the Radeon HD 5830 by nearly 8-FPS, and again surpasses the GeForce GTX 465 in this test. Reviewers like to say "Nobody plays a benchmark", but it seems evident that we can expect to see great things come from a graphics tool this detailed. For now though, those details only come by way of DirectX-11 video cards. It's worth noting that if there was a cost involved with Unigine's Heaven benchmark, the GeForce GTX 460 would cost $1.81 less per frame than the Radeon HD 5830, and also cost less than all other DirectX-11 video cards.

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