Unigine Valley Benchmark DX11 Benchmark Released, Multi-Platform, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

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. This benchmark features a number of graphics technologies and interactive modes.

The Valley Benchmark includes 64,000,000 square meters of very detailed terrain that includes mountains with snow-capped peaks, green expanses, rocky slopes, flowers, and a number of other photorealistic renderings. Unigine's previous generation Heaven Benchmark was widely known to make heavy use of DX11 tessellation effects to increase terrain and object geometry detail and fidelity.  Valley will likely incorporate more of the same.

Key features of the Valley Benchmark include:

• Extreme hardware stability testing
• Per-frame GPU temperature and clock monitoring
• Multi-platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
• Advanced visual technologies: dynamic sky, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF, ambient occlusion
• 64 000 000 square meters of extremely detailed, seamless terrain
• Procedural object placement of vegetation and rocks
• The entire valley is free to be explored in interactive fly-by or hike-through modes
• User-controlled dynamic weather
• Support for stereo 3D and multi-monitor configurations
• Benchmarking presets
• Command line automation support
• Highly customizable reports in CSV format

Unigine offers a free basic edition of this benchmark as well as Advanced and Pro versions. The Valley Benchmark is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 as well as Linux and Mac OS X 10.8+. You'll need 1.5GB of hard drive space and  one of the following GPUs with at least 512MB of memory to run the test: an ATI Radeon HD 4xxx or higher, NVIDIA GeForce 8xxx or higher, or Intel HD 3000 and higher.