Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 FleX 1GB

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.

While the HD 5770 came ahead of GTS 450 in 3DMark Vantage, NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture helps it excel in the heavily tessellated Unigine Heaven. Will we see things shake up with AMD’s upcoming Northern Islands launch? We’ll find out soon enough.