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 Moderate Quality Settings

Cost Analysis: Unigine Heaven (1920x1200)

• $242 Radeon HD 6870 1GB costs $9.13 per FPS
• $255 GeForce GTX 470 1GB costs $8.67 per FPS
• $324 Radeon HD 5870 1GB costs $12.51 per FPS
• $437 GeForce GTX 480 1536MB costs $11.94 per FPS
• $460 EVGA GTX 460 FTW SLI costs $8.10 per FPS
• $484 Radeon HD 6870 CrossFireX costs $9.18 per FPS
• $520 ASUS ENGTX580 1536MB costs $11.53 per FPS
• $520 ASUS GTX 580 Overclocked costs $10.42 per FPS
• $570 Radeon HD 5970 2GB costs $12.98 per FPS

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.

In Unigine's Heaven benchmark, both the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and ATI Radeon HD 5870 video cards trail behind the GeForce GTX 470, making the 5870's value rating is the worst of the entire bunch while the opposite is true for the GTX 470. The dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 5970 is positioned between the older GeForce GTX 480 and new GeForce GTX 580, and all three share the $11 cost per FPS range. Combining two Radeon HD 6870 video cards into CrossFire will get you the best frame rate performance, and surprisingly, it nearly matches the best overall value. The overclocked ENGTX580 manages to drop into the mid-$10 range in our cost analysis, but a pair of overclocked GeForce GTX 460 video cards in SLI capture the best price point.

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