Testing – Benchmarks
Next up we have a set of benchmarking tools that many of you are familiar with. These benchmarks are all freely available to download and use real game engines so they give you a good idea of what real game performance would be like.
Unigine Heaven is an extremely popular tool for measuring GPU performance. It is used in almost every hardware test you’ll have seen in the last 2 years, omitting it simply isn’t an option. We are currently using v4.0 of the benchmark. The settings we used are: DirectX 11, Quality: Medium, Tessellation: Moderate, Anti-Aliasing: x2, full screen. We ran the benchmark at 3 different resolutions.
Next up is the Valley benchmark. It is a newer benchmark from the same people that brought us the Heaven benchmark. We are running the basic edition of the benchmark and our settings are: API: DirectX 11, Quality: High, Anti-aliasing: x4, Full Screen. Again we ran the benchmark at 4 different resolutions.
A tool similar to heaven but utilizing the DX11 technologies in a different manner is Stone Giant. Created to show that advanced geometry can be used to create mind-blowingly awesome creatures and landscapes, Stone Giant – much like heaven – utilizes your hardware effectively and pushes it, providing you with FPS information once the run finishes. The settings that were used were: Tessellation: High, Aspect Ratio: 16:9.
A new benchmark we are starting to use is TessMark. TessMark is an OpenGL benchmark and tech demo that uses the new GPU tessellation features. Hardware tessellation makes it possible to divide a polygon into smaller ones (according to the tessellation level factor) in order to increase polygons density: the higher the tessellation level, the higher the polygon density. A high tessellation level requires much GPU processing power. The settings we used were: Map Set: 3, Tessellation: Extreme (x32), Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Anti-aliasing: 4x MSAA.
