Unigine unveils new Valley Benchmark
Unigine's Valley benchmark creates an impressively detailed simulation of 64,000 square kilometres of Siberian countryside.
Based on the same Unigine Engine as the popular Heaven benchmark, Valley ditches the steampunk-inspired floating village for something a little more down-to-earth: a digital representation of the company's native Siberia. 'Living in Siberia, we wanted to show how beautiful the nature is here' claims Andrey Kushner, Unigine's lead technical artist, of the decision to relocate the benchmark's setting. 'It is full of contrasts, and flowers can grow through the deadfall right next to brutal mountains. It was an interesting challenge to create this huge, yet detailed world. Moreover, our engine is so flexible that we could place all objects procedurally and recreate this valley with photorealistic graphics.'
As with Heaven, Valley is designed to put some serious stress on even the most powerful graphics card. The benchmark allows for per-frame GPU temperature and clock monitoring, supports stereoscopic monitors and multi-monitor setups, and comes with a range of benchmarking presets for easy comparisons between PCs. Where Valley differs from Heaven is in scale: Unigine's latest benchmark features 64,000 square kilometres of detailed terrain modelled on the Siberian countryside through which users are free to fly or hike when not in benchmarking mode.
Other advanced features include user-controllable dynamic weather settings, a dynamic sky with volumetric clouds, sun shafts, impressive depth of field effects and ambient occlusion, while the company has worked on a procedural placement engine for the valley's varied vegetation and rocks - with the result that Unigine claims the valley is 'unique in every corner.'
As with the most recent Heaven release, Valley Benchmark is available for free in a Basic Edition for Windows, OS X and Linux, while a $19.95 Advanced Edition - $5 more expensive than Heaven 4.0 Advanced, interestingly enough - brings benchmark looping, command-line automation and CSV exports of results to the mix. As with Heaven, professional use is limited to Valley Benchmark Professional at a cost of $495.
If you're curious to check out the latest Unigine benchmark, the free version can be downloaded now from the official site - and while you're waiting, here's a little taster of what's in store.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyWould love to see these kind of graphics in games.
Liked the uneven surfaces.
Tessellation to the max!
I originally set up my gfx card OC using heaven, which hit a max temp of 75ish, even on 4.0. 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.
Might give it a shot when they're £20. Then I'll have to decide whether 2GB of DDR3 or 1GB of GDDR5 will give me the best performance, when the APU is using DDR3 system RAM...
Well to be fair, this benchmark is pretty punishing to even the best GPUs out there. So if you can get 30fps at those settings I'd say you're doing alright. I have a HD5750 and I can only get around 40FPS at the lowest settings, but 1080p resolution.
http://i433.photobucket.com/albums/qq59/waynio_2008/valley.jpg
Inconsistent though like heaven, glitchy min FPS on scene switches over various runs but it mostly rolls along at 60 to 80 FPS on my 2500k @4.2 & SLI 670, highest temp on both cards reached 70c.
And yes I don't feel any need at all for higher than 2x AA on 1440P, you may think you lose in performance going from 1080p to 1440p but you don't when you factor less need for AA, 2x AA works nicely. :D
Teamed with OLED Oculus Rift , would anyone want to leave that VR world?
Maybe, when the next gen games get ported across to PC, on max settings it'll look somewhat similar?
I would so I can maintain a reasonable level of health & sanity in the game we call reality but for sure I'd go & get lost in an awesome virtual world for a day now & then, beats getting wasted because it doesn't fry your brain cells while enhancing your imagination & costs less too, key is to have other interests besides tech & gaming. :D
I could sprint to a cliff edge & do a long jump & while jumping past a bird could grab it, pet it & let it go before I plummet to the ground in a fake world just for the heck of it to see the world a bit differently without consequences, no can do in reality without training & a wing suit & a great height to do it from. :)
I've got high hopes for next gen consoles, hope they don't fluff it up & take things in a wonky direction due to the money that can be made from crap games on phones these days.
Game devs if they want to grab bigger audience they'd have to mix awesome grade adventure game with awesome grade action game that seamlessly switches between the 2 types so you get a quality deep complex highly interactive story that can change paths to the end of the story along with great action that pumps the adrenaline into the game, if the new Aliens game was done like that it would have rocked the world probably more than the movies did & made a lot of none gamers get interested as well as really impress gamers because Alien was far more than just shooting things.
Bit of a ramble there.
Yeah The Elder Scrolls VI and GTA would look class
The PC community have waited too long. At least we're almost there, next gen consoles will finally allow games worthy of our hardware.
Crytek and a few others are more than capable of producing visuals like that now, just look at their latest engine demo. Of course, there are the well known problems with the API limiting PC performance . Top end PCs may even have problems running PS4 games at the same level of visual fidelity because of this API handicap . Maybe on- chip GPGPU solutions will solve this , if/ when the GPU can function independently setting up work for itself.