New Heaven's Benchmark will be version 2.0 not 1.1

[EastCoasthandle]

According to the article over at SemiAccurate this benchmark program will be version 2.0 and not 1.1 as originally thought. It will include more scenes, art assets, tessellation. It's unclear what improvements are provided from 1.1 as that was never released to the public. However a tweet from Den Shergin, CEO, Project Manager of Unigine indicates that they've improved performance by 30% by aggressive culling. If interested you can follow his tweets here. What has been said about the newer benchmark is found below:

What's new:

• Heavy refactoring of base materials.
• Tessellation state is switched on/off automatically depending on distance to the object.
• Updated DirectX SDK headers to February 2010 version.
• Verbose list of textures used by the render.
• Added validation of duplicate surface names and incorrect bone weights for skinned meshes into 3dsMax plugins.
• Fixed a wrong animation frame number being displayed in ResourceEditor.
• Support of uniform_buffer_object in OpenGL.
• Global scaling settings for tessellation parameters and reflection color.
• Added GL_ARB_sample_shading OpenGL extension support for supersample alpha-testing.
• Fixed inheritance of properties by BodyFracture pieces.
• ImageDDS tool now supports OpenCL for faster image compression (-opencl command line option).
• More efficient mesh optimizator.
• Spark emitter generates particles oriented along the normal of collided surface.
• Added 'auto' pseudo-type of variables in UnigineScript.
• Fixed the order of objects destruction by exiting UnigineScript.
• Node ID is now displayed in UnigineEditor now.
• Simplification of HDR cross shader.
• Added a full set of 32/64 bit plugins for Maya 2008, 2009 and 2010.
• Increased speed of grass and foliage rendering.
• Optimized supersampled alpha-testing for 8x AA mode.
• Bunch of minor fixes.

[Marineborn]

thats sweet, can wait to benchmark this

[EastCoasthandle]

Yeah, take a moment a click on his tweets (in the OP). Here is something he said:

Heaven benchmark 2.0 will show you more beautiful content and optimized version of tessellation work in Unigine Engine

[EastCoasthandle]

Rumored results of Heaven's 2.0 version is said to yield 40% improvment on a 5870
Read here

[Divide Overflow]

Any estimate on when the new version will be released?

[human_error]

Originally Posted by Divide Overflow

Any estimate on when the new version will be released?

isn't TPU still hosting the RC2 of the benchmark? It was here earlier today. The problem is they have changed the benchmark by adding an airship, dock and floating fort so the fps can't be compared between the two when benchmarking (i infact see a drop from 61fps to 49fps average at max graphics, 1920x1200, 16AF, 2xAA).

[W1zzard]

we were told not to host the RC1 version .. now i see a 2.0 version out (ngohq.com) but havent heard from unigine whether it's ok to host it ..

[W1zzard]

just got authorization .. download mirrors incoming

[EastCoasthandle]

Stock GPU

Heaven BM 2.0 can be downloaded here at TPU
DX11
Linux

[DRDNA]

4GHZ
stock GPU

[EastCoasthandle]

I'm still trying to figure out what replication mode is...

Edit:
Odd, people are able to enable it but I don't see the option, yet...

Side Note:
To convert a Binary File to an XML File, use:

atiapfxx -r -b fileX -s file1

[EastCoasthandle]

Another note, there is virtually no difference in IQ between normal and extreme tessellation. I wonder if this is a nv thing?

[DirectorC]

Maybe normal is when it is turned off for items at a distance and extreme is when it's always on? Thus why you don't notice and why it was a smart idea to implement.

[EastCoasthandle]

As far as extreme and normal go the IQ is the same. As for replication even on extreme I am not seeing anything saying that it's on or not.

[Binge]

Updated the Unigine Heaven Benchmark thread to accept 2.0 submissions, and made a link to the TPU mirror.

My OCed results

[mlee49]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

just got authorization .. download mirrors incoming

Will this be added to the DX11 card reviews? Pretty please!

[DirectorC]

Originally Posted by mlee49

Will this be added to the DX11 card reviews? Pretty please!

Agreed. Though it'd probably be best to write a complete article covering the entire range of DX11 cards with this new version.

[EastCoasthandle]

Originally Posted by mlee49

Will this be added to the DX11 card reviews? Pretty please!

I hope not someone snooped around to see what this version does, here are the results:

It uses CUDA calls.

I was asked to edit the post and simplify the text here.

It was the XML used by the engine for procedural calling of the files.

The engine is rather shady, and it has artifacts in the shadows. The problems with the engine are not entirely resolved. It is asking for calls that don't exist yet.

source

Apparently this is looking more and more like a nv released benchmark.

[DirectorC]

Uh-oh, let the FUD fest begin!

[jessicafae]

Originally Posted by DirectorC

Agreed. Though it'd probably be best to write a complete article covering the entire range of DX11 cards with this new version.

I second this idea. If the extreme tessellation mode appears to only increase work load without improving image quality, then wouldn't that indicate that extreme tessellation will never end up in games? why do extra work if it gives no benefit.

If we want to test pure number crunching power of these GPUs, maybe a better test would be the GPU accelerated WI-FI password cracker called Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor

[EastCoasthandle]

If you go into the heaven 2.0 directory, you will find heaven.zip (...\Unigine\Heaven\data\demos). If you unpack that, you can see all the mesh files. If you have the free SDK, you will find optimized code that looks for specific hardware before defaulting to a secondary engine.

It doesn't name what it is looking for, but it looks for a specific hardware string, and when it is not found, it just falls back to the old render.

The problem with seaming is still not resolved.

The Tessellation optimization is not truly in place. Instead, we have a series of improved render methods that stack on top of each other. One major flaw with the engine that I already see in version 2.0 is that it is basically version 1.0 with new extensions added that I have not seen before. They are not DX11 library files. They are something else.

I'm not going to say it's nVidia optimized, but it certainly drops a lot of tessellation in, without taking into consideration the fact that a computer will have to run other tasks while rendering it. The CPU usage is maxed out as well.

Running it on our NV simulator, I don't see any advantages, but out simulator is 9 months old, and exists in software to test for final game compatibility, and there are calls that do not exist in that simulator.

I suppose we will soon see. I still say Voxel rendering is more efficient. Seeing as Tessellation on the GTX 480 is handled through CUDA emulation, it can use as many stream processors as it needs to handle the tessellation... but this does not take into account out of order processing, Physx, scenario render, destructible environments, or any other real world scenario.

In short, version 2.0 looks as broken as version 1.0.

We never got to get our hands on 1.1, and Unigine would not send it to me, stating that they did not produce it. I later found out that nVidia bought a license and produced 1.1. As far as I can see, this is not a real world scenario.

The environments are pretty, but they failed to use tessellation gap fill by overlapping or crossing the seams. It looks like it was thrown together to meet a launch date.

source

[EastCoasthandle]

Wow everyone is speechless or something?

When you launch the benchmark, press the tilde key ~ and enter the console...
Then type:d3d11_render_use_replication 1

[Binge]

Originally Posted by EastCoasthandle

Wow everyone is speechless or something?

What does it do?

[EastCoasthandle]

It increases performance with no noticeable IQ loss. Again Stock GPU.


You will see that Replication is now enabled. There is no other option to turn it on right now other then type it in.

[DeathByTray]

Can anyone test whether wireframe mode works and post a screenshot?

I am asking because this is kinda strange:

Crash in wireframe mode on ATI Radeon HD 5xxx

Please don't use wireframe mode with tessellation enabled.

http://unigine.com/products/heaven/