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Unigine's Newest Benchmark Features Huge, Open-Space Expanses

Posted by timothy on from the free-roaming-but-not-free-software dept.

jones_supa writes "Unigine announced a new GPU benchmark known as Valley Benchmark. From the same developers who created Heaven Benchmark, the Valley Benchmark is a non-synthetic benchmark that is powered by the Unigine Engine, a real-time 3D engine that supports the latest rendering features. The Valley Benchmark includes massive area of 64 square kilometers of very detailed terrain that includes forest, mountains, green expanses, rocky slopes and flowers. The area can be freely explored by means of walking or flying. All major operating systems are supported."

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. beautiful! here is most of the techniques used.. by goruka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    -Instancing: For drawing lots of trees without draw call overhead.
    -Impostors: For the groups of trees far away
    -Vertex Program: For the sway of the trees, probably with per vertex amount of strength
    -PSSM: For the shadows
    -Godrays: For the sunrays through the trees
    -HDR+Bloom with luminance bleeding: For the lighting and skybox
    -Instanced Particles: For the clouds

    I sure am forgetting some of them, but I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.

  2. Re:beautiful! here is most of the techniques used. by Gaygirlie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    -Godrays: For the sunrays through the trees

    Nitpick: that's not a technique. Those rays of light are called godrays, it says nothing about the implementation technique.

    I sure am forgetting some of them, but I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.

    I checked out the YouTube - video and, well, I see huge amounts of people complaining about the apparently-poor texture resolution of this benchmark. IMHO, these people are missing the whole point of the demo as the demo is not intended to show exceedingly impressive textures or such. The speeds at which the engine can manage to do so beautiful real-time shadows and lighting, huge, open landscape with loads of foliage, the impressively realistic fogging in certain areas and so on, these are the focus here. I certainly would trade some texture resolution for more realistic lighting and environmental effects in games if it ever came to such a choice.