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.

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.

• Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1
  • Extreme Settings: (High Quality, Normal Tessellation, 16x AF, 4x AA

Heaven 2.1 Extreme Quality Settings

Cost Analysis: Unigine Heaven (1920x1200)

Test Summary: 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. Our 'extreme' test results with the Unigine Heaven benchmark tool appear to deliver fair comparisons of DirectX-11 graphics cards when set to higher quality levels. Heaven 2.1 is a very demanding benchmark tool, which is why tessellation is set to normal levels and antialiasing is reduced to 4x.

The ASUS GeForce GTX 480 produced 36.6 FPS, which nearly matched the AMD Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU video card, and surpassed the Radeon HD 5870 by more than 41%. Combining two GTX 480's into an SLI set rendered 68.2 FPS on the Unigine Heaven benchmark, amounting to an impressive 93% SLI scaling efficiency.

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