OpenGL: Synthetic Gaming Performance
Unigine Heaven 4.0
Unigine Heaven 4.0 is one of those tests that helps us evaluate the performance of cutting-edge graphics features in a real game engine when we’re benchmarking under DirectX 11. What happens when we run it under OpenGL instead, though? Here are the metric’s key features:
- Comprehensive use of hardware tessellation, with adjustable settings
- Dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and tweakable day/night cycle
- Real-time global illumination and screen-space ambient occlusion
- Cinematic and interactive fly/walk-through camera modes
Although the Radeon HD 7990 leads the pack, it’s also obvious that SLI offers better scaling in this OpenGL benchmark than CrossFire.
Unigine Sanctuary (OpenGL)
The second benchmark from Unigine emphasizes a different set of features, and Nvidia’s cards do unexpectedly well. The Radeon board seem to struggle with Sanctuary’s particle system—something we’ve also observed in other benchmarks. Throw lots of particles at the AMD cards and they slow down noticeably.
- Five dynamic lights
- HDR rendering
- Parallax occlusion mapping
- Ambient occlusion mapping
- Translucence
- Volumetric light and fog
- Particle systems
- Post-processing
Unigine Tropics
The Radeon HD 7990 pulls ahead of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 690, reversing the trend we see from single-GPU cards based on the same GPUs. Here’s a summary of this test’s key aspects:
- Dynamic sky with light scattering
- Live water with a surf zone and caustics
- Special materials for vegetation
- HDR rendering
- Parallel split shadow map
- Depth of field
- Real-time ambient occlusion
- Up to 2M polygons per frame
- Simulation of changing light conditions
