by Rob Williams on April 4, 2011 in Graphics & Displays
In recent months, we’ve seen AMD and NVIDIA go back and forth with releases that are designed to one-up the other at the respective price-point, and with AMD’s Radeon HD 6790, it doesn’t look like this game will end anytime soon. Set to compete against the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, the HD 6790 launches with the same MSRP of $149.
While Futuremark is a well-established name where PC benchmarking is concerned, Unigine is just beginning to become exposed to people. The company’s main focus isn’t benchmarks, but rather its cross-platform game engine which it licenses out to other developers, and also its own games, such as a gorgeous post-apocalytic oil strategy game. The company’s benchmarks are simply a by-product of its game engine.
The biggest reason that the company’s “Heaven” benchmark grew in popularity rather quickly is that both AMD and NVIDIA promoted it for its heavy use of tessellation, a key DirectX 11 feature. Like 3DMark Vantage, the benchmark here is overkill by design, so results here aren’t going to directly correlate with real gameplay. Rather, they showcase which card models can better handle both DX11 and its GPU-bogging features.
Since AMD’s HD 6000 series launch, the company has worked hard to bring its tessellation performance up to NVIDIA’s level, and judging by these graphs, I’d say the company’s done well – especially since NVIDIA has been the tessellation king for quite some time.