bit-tech.net

Unigine launches Heaven 4.0 benchmark

Published on 13th February 2013 by Gareth Halfacree

Unigine Heaven 4.0 brings a new and improved engine, benchmarking presets and a new $14.95 'Advanced' edition for those who can't afford the near-$500 'Professional' version.

Unigine has released a new version of its popular Heaven benchmark, bringing new benchmarking presets to aid comparisons between platforms along with a cheaper 'Advanced' version for those who have outgrown the free release.

As with its predecessor, Heaven 4.0 provides GPU-bound benchmarking and stability testing for free in an impressively-realised steampunk floating village - complete with airship. A popular choice of overclockers, thanks to the stress it can place on even the beefiest of SLI or CrossFire setups, previous Heaven benchmark releases have been available only in Free and Professional editions - with the latter costing a cool $495.

Heaven 4.0, by contrast, brings with it an Advanced Edition, designed for those whose budgets don't stretch quite so far. Costing just $14.95, the Heaven 4.0 Advanced adds command-line automation functionality, a stress-test mode which loops repeatedly through the benchmarking process, and customisable reports which output in comma separated value (CSV) format. Those who need Heaven for commercial use, rendering of specific frames, a DirectX 11 software rendering mode or commercial support, meanwhile, are still pointed towards the Professional version.

The new Heaven benchmark isn't just about providing a subset of Professional features at a more affordable price, though. Unigine has also added benchmarking presets to help compare results between users and platforms, the ability to monitor the temperature and clock of a system's GPU(s), improvements to the engine's lens flare and scene space directional occlusion (SSDO) implementations, and even added stars in the sky during the night-time portion of the benchmark.

Heaven 4.0 also includes proper detection of multiple GPUs, support for anti-aliasing on OS X for the first time, and improved automation scripts with the Professional release. Russian and Chinese localisation is also provided.

As with previous releases, Heaven 4.0 is available for Windows - where it uses DirectX 9 or 11 - alongside OS X and Linux - where OpenGL 4.0 is used - and can be downloaded now from the official website.

4 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

damien c 13th February 2013, 13:09

Look's interesting will run it tonight to see if there is anything different in terms of scores.

The_Crapman 13th February 2013, 16:18

It's a little hard to compare results, as the settings are slightly different different from v3. However, seems like it's a fait bit tougher. On my rig-sig with everything at stock i got with the settings as close as I can make out:

1119, 21.3min, 113max and 44.4avg fps on v3
890, 7.5min, 85.7max and 35.3avg fps on v4

There's a couple of places in v4 where the fps bombs for a fraction of a second. Will run again and confirm where.

EDIT: Did 2 further runs, both had a small dip at the very beginning of scene 19 (on my first run it happened at halfway through 18 then start of 19), but nowhere near as dramatic as in my first run. Run No.2 went from 21.2 to 17.4 and run No.3 went from 21.3 to 17.1. First run must have been an anomaly.

LightningPete 14th February 2013, 13:27

If there was anything that could blue screen your overclocked GPU that was stable at windows, this is it :D
I find V3 was most effective for gaming when clocking the sheer nuts off a Core2Duo E6600 and GTX285 - managed to get 80mhz on the GPU chip stable with circa 230mhz mem whilst performing Uni benchies

tozsam 14th February 2013, 13:49

I originally set up my gfx card OC using heaven, which hit a max temp of 75ish, even on the new version. However Far Cry 3 has been burning a hole in my gfx card, hitting temps of 90+, but no crashes ingame. If this is a stress test/benchmark, why isnt it giving me the max temp of my card?
What prog can I use to find the max temp so I can clock my gfx card down a bit? I've heard my card clocks down itself (580gtx) with Furmark, so you dont get a realistic result.