First DirectX 11 Benchmark from Unigine

Unigine has release the first DirectX 11 benchmark based on its proprietary Unigine engine. The benchmark, named "Heaven", features native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11, hardware tessellatio ntechnology, 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 and support for ATI Eyefinity.

The benchmark shows off DirectX 11s potential well. Check out the floating islands with miniature village hidden in the clouds. Unigines advanced rendering is one of the first to showcasing the potential of tessellation for elevating 3D gaming. Although ATI already has a form of hardware tesselation, called ATI-TrueForm, on production video cards, to date there have only been a handful of games using it to advantage, such as Quake and UT. We hope this new benchmark inspires a few more game companies to move quicker down this road.

Hardware tessellation is a rendering technology which automatically subdivides polygons into smaller pieces, so game developers can get a more detailed look with no degradation in speed or performance. Instead of including a tessellation map in the games software,nthe tessellation takes place in the GPU, making for cleaner, faster code. But all you really need to know is how great it looks.

The heaven benchmark can be downloaded from the official website for free.