Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark Is Beautiful, Free, and (to Gamers) Useful - brownleehatterouble

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Sport to use
Accessible user interface
Beautiful visuals

Cons

Pro version is expensive
Codification lacks polish

Our Finding of fact

Justify your gaming obsession with a minuscule slash of Heaven.

High-remainder video card game are hungry, demanding beasts. They eat money, suck down power, run hot, and occasionally require complex device driver configuration or other special care reciprocally for the visual thrills they bring home the bacon. Moreover, the benefits of such a apparatus can atomic number 4 hard to appreciate over a well-Chosen middle-cast alternative, specially at the time of purchase. Unless multiple monitors or very high resolutions inherit play, the extra FPS and features you pay for won't matter until later, when you're competent to skip future year's upgrade cycle or run games which put through those new technologies. That's bad thin soup for most gamers, who want to see the artistry they paid for onscreen now, not next winter. Unigine's Nirvana is a synthetic play benchmark that provides side by side-generation artwork today, delivering the visual goods while doing its best to harbor you in the process.

Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark — Bumping up tessellation in Unigine's Heaven DX11 benchmark brings every but the mightiest hardware to its knees.

Designed as a showcase for DirectX11, Heaven provides a fully accomplished, outdoor 3D environment filled with plush vegetation and extremely detailed models. The floating islands are dotted with dragons, dirigibles and new surprises fondly rendered away an engine that supports ambient occlusion, stereo 3D, tessellation and other advanced features that are only when just now starting to appear in top-shelf computer games. The built in flyby test provides a score for comparison to another systems, but the real fun present resides in the open nature of Unigine's world; by taking down the fences and allowing users to explore they've made Heaven the Skyrim of benchmarking.

Using simple keyboard controls familiar to most gamers you throne freely navigate the environment and alter just about all visual setting in real time; a more interactive and amusing feel for than a electrostatic flyby. This instant feedback allows you to easily separate the options that fly the coop smoothly from those that stifle framerates. You can also alter the time of day (the flatulence lamps excite at night), toggle the soundtrack on or off and select between several camera modes. Although designed for DX11, Heaven also supports DX9 and 10 along with OpenGL, making it a one-block off tool suitable for a wide range of systems. It was written with high-end rigs in mind, however, so you'll demand a strapping and fairly recent videocard to infiltrate Unigine's pearly-white gates.

While generally stable, a few peculiar situations occurred that suggest the code corpse unhewn. Occasional DX11 mistake messages during startup connected multi-display systems, clipping issues in free mold trend and unimplemented features displayed in the settings tabs show a deficiency of polish and optimization. Fortunately, these don't look to impact truth or usability. A fantastically expensive Pro variant exists for close to $500 USD, just the differences between the free and favoring versions boil down to mechanisation, information export, and commercial licensing, aspects much relevant to developers than to most gamers. While products such as 3DMark Basic whitethorn provide more comprehensive data and other frills, Heaven is faster to run, more flexible and definitely more fun. I also reckon information technology looks better than 3DMark Basic 11's murky underwater world. If you'Ra a gamer with a mid- to heights-end system and want to see what games will look the likes of in a yr or two, Heaven awaits.

–Jim Norris

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