NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GF100 DX11 Video Card Review

Unigine ‘Heaven’ DX11

The ‘Heaven’ benchmark that uses the Unigine easily shows off the full potential of DirectX 11 graphics cards. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode emerging, experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extent and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming. The distinguishing feature of the benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand.

For this benchmark VSync was turned off and we tested with 0x AA and 4x AF to check out system performance. We also ran the benchmark at 1920×1200 and 1280×1024 to see how the benchmark ran at some different monitor resolutions.

Benchmark Results: The Unigine Heaven Benchmark showed that the NVIDIA GTX 480 card had a 28% performance increase over the MSI R5870 Lighting in 1280×1024. The GTX 480 was still well ahead of the closest 5870 in 1920×1200 resolutions as it stayed ahead of the MSI Lighting by almost 16%!

We also ran the new Heaven 2.0 benchmark that just came out on a couple of the cards as we were in a time crunch. For this benchmark VSync was turned off and we tested with 8x AA and 16x AF to check out system performance. We also ran the benchmark at 1920×1200 and 1280×1024 to see how the benchmark ran at some different monitor resolutions. It should be noted that we ran the new extreme tessellation mode on this benchmark. These are the toughest settings that you can run on this benchmark, so it should really put the hurt on any graphics card.

Benchmark Results: The Unigine Heaven 2.0 Benchmark is tessellation heavy and it showed that the NVIDIA GTX 480 video card had a 25% performance increase over the dual-GPU powered Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 that beat it in the original Heaven 1.0 benchmark. This goes to show that when it comes to extreme tessellation settings that the GTX 480 has some serious potential and if games get into heavy tessellation the architecture of the GeForce GTX 480 will dominate the competition.