The developers of the achingly beautiful Heaven and Valley benchmarks are on the verge of yet again granting us the power to mesmerize ourselves whilst putting our GPUs thoroughly through their paces.
have been providing the PC gaming community with an easy way to find out what their GPUs can really do whilst dazzling with spectacular visuals for a decade and is their newest offering. The benchmark is set in an abandoned classroom which belongs to a Professor who is definitely up to something! There are inventions and peculiar items littered around the office for us to peruse and inspect. It seems that Unigine may have even left us a mystery to solve which can only be solved by invading the Professor’s privacy and rummaging through his records, instruments and inspecting every pixel.
What else do we know about the benchmark? It is powered by Unigine 2 Engine and will support DirectX11 and for the first time they will also be providing a global leaderboard to let us see where our machines rank. The benchmark will be able to put your GPU under the microscope and help determine the stability of overclocks and stress the cooling solution of your GPU. It’s also time to get the goggles out as this benchmark has been built from the ground up with VR capabilities. Both Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive will be supported with a fully interactive VR experience. This should be an ideal test to find out if your rig is VR-Ready. With a parentage like Valley and Heaven we can only imagine how eye-watering this is going to be.
The road for Unigine took an unfortunate turn at the start of the year when they were taken down from Steam Greenlight despite having huge success. Shortly before this they held the number 1 spot on the Steam Greenlight voting system and had an initial release date of Q4 2016. But the wait is almost over and graphics cards around the world will soon be sweating for a spot on that leaderboard and gamers and overclockers alike will be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labour.
For a sneak peak of what is to come Unigine released a teaser trailer shot in 4k at 60fps:
