NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

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.

Being that NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture is heavily tuned to accelerate things like tessellation, the results here are of no surprise. In terms of tessellation and DirectX 11 in particular, any game that uses them should run far better on GF100 than AMD’s current offerings. NVIDIA might see some competition with AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series launch, but that still remains yet to be seen.