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 (1680x1050)

• $142 Radeon HD 5770 1GB costs $8.30 per FPS
• $167 GeForce GTX 460 768MB costs $6.12 per FPS
• $180 Radeon HD 6850 1GB costs $7.03 per FPS
• $188 Radeon HD 5830 1GB costs $8.91 per FPS
• $220 GeForce GTX 460 1GB costs $7.59 per FPS
• $240 Radeon HD 6870 1GB costs $7.95 per FPS
• $260 EVGA GTX 460 FTW 1GB costs $7.26 per FPS
• $262 Radeon HD 5850 1GB costs $10.08 per FPS
• $292 GeForce GTX 470 1GB costs $8.23 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.

Unigine's Heaven 2.1 benchmark delivered performance results similar to 3dMark Vantage, Aliens vs Predator, and BattleForge. Using Heaven 2.1, the Radeon HD 6850 trails behind the 768MB GeForce GTX 460 and really fails to match the value, yet still surpasses the Radeon HD 5830 by a significant margin. At 1680x1050 resolution with extreme quality settings, the Radeon HD 5770 produced 17.1 FPS in Unigine Heaven 2.1 compared to 21.1 with the Radeon HD 5830, while the Radeon HD 6850 produced 25.6 FPS. The Radeon HD 6870 surpasses the 1GB GeForce GTX 460 by a small margin, costing it more the value rating, but outperforms the older Radeon HD 5850 and offers a much better value. In this test, the GeForce GTX 470 was actually outmatched by the less-expensive EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW video card.

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