Unigine Heaven Benchmark

It was just this past week that I realized that since I upgraded my video card, I don't think I had ran the Heaven benchmark. I was reading something (what specifically I forget), when I saw another news posting. It said that the Heaven 4.0 was released.

The Unigine Heaven benchmark is a rather high end graphical benchmark tool. It was around before DirectX 11, but it has been updated with all its new whiz-bang features. It seems to be the "flagship" demo for Unigine Corp's (only?) product.

Heaven 4.0 screenshot, featuring the dragon statue

I ran Heaven 3.0, and saved the score, then installed and ran Heaven 4.0. The benchmark loop shows off all the cool parts of the world. The world, in this case, is a few large rocks floating in the sky. I didn't notice anything added to the world, but I noticed that the lighting was vastly different. Heaven 4.0 immediately seemed much brighter and more colorful, but not cartoony looking. The Heaven benchmarks are also the only ones that I know of that can use multiple monitors, which I especially appreciate. It makes for a really wide view.

It has plenty of options to modify certain graphical parameters. The tessellation parameters are especially striking, as it shows where and what tessellation actually does and affects. You can also control the time of day, which (as one would expect) makes the Sun rise, move, and set, along with lighting effects and quick moving shadows. The last part of the benchmark shows a wide angle sunrise, with shadows flying across the landscape; it is one of the most impressive things I have seen any videocard render.

If you have a beefy and/or recent videocard, you owe it to yourself to check this out. If not to do a benchmark, then just only to see what prettiness your videocard can produce.

You have a *GTX 680, right? Does the benchmark offer score after it's done or is a subjective benchmark? Also, did you happen to keep track of temperature and if the graphics card ever became audible?

My EVGA GTX 670 is audible just running while doing nothing intensive on the screen (unless you count those four uneven monitors), and it becomes only slightly louder when playing a game, but the coil whine via headphones is the deadly part. I don't have temperature stats, but I think it stays pretty cool.

@Ryan: Yes, I have an EVGA 680 SuperClocked Signature. (argh people don't read my blog...) Heaven offers a score afterwards, and you can even save it... to an HTML file, I think? I saved results for both 3 and 4. During the benchmark, Heaven itself also displays the GPU type, FPS, and temperatures right on the screen. My GPU doesn't/didn't get much over 78 degrees, but I'll check/rerun.

My card is fairly silent compared to the rest of my machine, because I also have some 60 mm fans in there. It's not at all overbearing even under a load. My 280 (which broke) always had those horrid capacitor screams at very high (>300) and low (<10) FPS; nothing like that at all now. I also have a dedicated sound card (Asus Xonar D2X) that requires a power connection directly from my PSU, and that reduces audio noise substantially. As you may notice that my podcasts don't have much noise in them, but sometimes running the Audacity compressor over it even once brings out the fan noise a bit.

Like I noticed with my podcast: music covereth a multitude of audible sins. Unlike most graphical benchmarks, Heaven has a soundtrack, and it's not bad.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

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