Unigine - Heaven Benchmark Results

Unigine Corp. released the first DirectX 11 benchmark "Heaven" that is based on its proprietary UnigineTM engine. The company has already made a name among the overclockers and gaming enthusiasts for uncovering the realm of true GPU capabilities with previously released "Sanctuary" and "Tropics" demos.

Recently Unigine released Heaven 2.0 with some new scenes and features. The biggest difference (besides all the newly installed cannons...?!?) is the ability to change the tessellation load. The jaded among us call the new Extreme Mode - "Fermi Mode", given the timing of the release and the fact that Heaven 1.0 was developed using the ATI Cypress chips and Heaven 2.0 was likely developed using NVIDIA GTX480s. For now, the Normal Mode seems best suited for today's hardware and it matches the results from Heaven 1.0 pretty well, so that what I used for testing.

Changes in version 2.0

• Heavier tessellation load
• Several major optimizations of the engine (including more effective culling of tessellated geometry)
• Added new elaborated objects in the world (airship, fort, pier)
• Physics-driven flags
• Added more dynamic lights
• Enhancements of some old assets
• Introduced "moderate" and "extreme" tessellation modes in addition to the "normal" one
  • Moderate Mode - This mode is targeted to provide reasonable performance on a wide range of DX11 hardware.
  • Normal Mode - Default mode available in the benchmark shows optimal quality-to-performance ratio.
  • Extreme Mode - Designed to meet the perspectives of the next series of DX11-capable hardware, pushing up the tessellation level to the extreme in the next 1-2 years.

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

Unigine Corp. is an international company focused on top-notch real-time 3D solutions. The development studio is located in Tomsk, Russia. Main activity of Unigine Corp. is development of UnigineTM, a cross-platform engine for virtual 3D worlds. Since the project start in 2004, it attracts attention of different companies and groups of independent developers, because Unigine is always on the cutting edge of real-time 3D visualization and physics simulation technologies.

Starting off with a lighter load of 4x MSAA, we see a steady progression of performance as you move up the ATI 5xxx ladder. The HD 5870 puts on a star performance to lead the crowd, and the overclock certainly doesn't hurt anything either. There is still some jerkiness to the display with most of the cards, until you get to the top two. This test was run with 4x anti-aliasing; let's see how the cards stack up when we increase MSAA to the maximum level of 8x.

Increasing the anti-aliasing did nothing to the relative rankings; it just pushed everything down about 15%. It's interesting to note that the HD 5850 doesn't stand out so much with this benchmark; everywhere else, it seems to jump a little higher that its neighbors. I also noticed less impact in Heaven 2.0 from the chimney smoke. In Heaven 1.0, when there was a bit of smoke in the scene, the frame rate dropped dramatically, and it really hurt the older cards in DX10 mode.

Let's take a look at one more benchmark, a decidedly less cheerful scenario in a post-apocalyptic "Zone", which is traversed by mercenary guides called Stalkers.

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