Unigine’s Heaven 2.5 Introduces SSDO, Improved AO and Bug Fixes

Unigine, the company behind the popular DX11 benchmark “Heaven”, has just announced a rather significant upgrade, coming in the form of “2.5”. Long heralded as one of the best measures of DX11 and tessellation performance out there, Heaven 2.5 brings SSDO support for improved global illumination, better ambient occlusion quality and numerous bug fixes.

The previous version of Heaven had a couple of issues under Windows where the program would crash or halt after being run for a couple of hours, and also issues directly related to the launcher. In addition, small content fixes and glitches were patched up, but for the most part, the level of customization remains ultimately the same.

Due to the fact that the content has been updated, though, and things like AO being improved and SSDO added, the results from 2.5 won’t be comparable to 2.1 or earlier. For that reason we will not be immediately implementing the latest version into our test suite, but hope to in the months ahead (it’s a lot of work re-benchmarking 20+ GPU configurations!).

Catering to the professional testers out there, Unigine has unveiled a “Professional Edition”, priced at $499 USD. This version allows the program to be run via the command-line, report to CSV and also be used for strees-testing. In addition, this version also features technical support and is officially licensed for commercial use.

You can grab the latest version of the benchmark right off of the official site linked to below.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. It the first DirectX 11 benchmark in the world, the original version was released at the moment of Microsoft Windows 7 launch in October, 2009.