Unigine's Newest Benchmark Features Huge, Open-Space Expanses 87
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."
My results (Score:5, Informative)
Are here [google.com] under Fedora.
Heres mine (Score:3)
http://burnedchips.com/results.jpg [burnedchips.com]
not to shabby for a 2009 budget box
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Noticing higher results in Windows 7 over Linux (See Windows OpenGL score [google.com])
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I just ran it with OGL and lost nearly 100 pts, so that has some effect as well
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No, not at all. Certainly more a more GPU intenesive benchmark then CPU. Your GPU probably does pretty good for a lot of games at that monitor resolution.
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yea it does pretty ok until it needs the cpu and ram, the 720 isnt the best of the bunch and the ram is 1066 DDR2, even then is usually just a little jitter given the xbox state of most games
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I must say that looking at your photo, you would make an excellent supervillian. You should consider purchasing a longhaired white cat to sit on your lap, so you could stroke her fur while smiling in an unsettling manner.
I'd sign up as a henchman.
Captcha is "Angstrom" which would be a good supervillain name. Dr. Angstrom, or maybe Professor Angstrom.
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Perhaps I should consider a career change....
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The angstrom is the SI unit for anxiety and turmoil.
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i5 3570K + GTX 460
Skyrim (Score:3, Interesting)
All they have to do is rename it The Elder Scrolls VI and they have themselves a finished game.
Re:Skyrim (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. They would still need a test of bucket and body physics [youtube.com].
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Nope. They would still need a test of bucket and body physics [youtube.com].
And whatever rag doll physics are needed when someone takes an arrow to the knee.
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Elder Scrolls would fit in a small corner of Tera Online. I spent several hours once just riding up into the mountains outside a city once.
beautiful! here is most of the techniques used.. (Score:5, Interesting)
-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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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> Nitpick: that's not a technique. Those rays of light are called godrays, it says nothing about the implementation technique.
Indeed. They could be using "Volumetric Light", "Occlusion Stencil", or as a post-process in Screen Space. Hard to tell which algorithm they are using.
Reference:
* http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch13.html [nvidia.com]
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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.
Nitpick: The benchmark misses the point of benchmarks. I mean, instancing is fine, but why include a trick like "imposters" to give the illusion of the visuals being more complex than they are if you're trying to stress the hardware. Seems counter productive to me. I mean, if you're going to make a game, fine, you want it to run great on lesser end hardware, but why make a benchmark that emulates game behaviors? If you want more accurate "real world" use cases, why not just benchmark with existing game
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It's propably you wo misses the point. The idea is to bench a realistical workload. Since techniques for replacing far away objects are used in almost every game it makes perfect to include it. Besides, you could not render such scenes without it in real time
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You really have to make a new engine from scratch emulating what game developers would do to test the video cards. After all, instancing is a part which stresses the hardware, if you are not using instancing, what hardware are you actually testing? And if you tested just raw polygons, wouldn't you be avoiding the use of most silicon which got developed precisely for these other "tricks"?
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Or you could go with neither and have hundreds of square kilometers of rock/concrete texture *Cough*MassEffect*Cough*
Re:beautiful! here is most of the techniques used. (Score:4, Insightful)
It still gets a lot of pop-up though. Most engines seem to have this problem where everything far away is okay and every up close is okay, but in the middle ground things just pop into existence and look terrible.
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I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
It actually uses quite a lot of LOD -- even at the highest settings there aren't ever very many triangles on screen. As TFS says, this isn't meant to be a synthetic benchmark. It's not made to stress any one specific thing, and it really doesn't.
Some of the tech it is demoing is pretty cool, even if the resulting image isn't very impressive. In the hands of proper designers, this stuff could be awesome.
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::yawn:: So, it's not a "benchmark" -- it's a tech demo of what you can do with the Unreal Engine?
Never disturb my slumber again. . ..zzZ Z Z
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you forgot
-Laggy non gradient detail POPUP: for when you just need to hide grass at a fixed level and look like 5 year old x360/PS3 game
-Microshutter: Why display smooth animation if we can "optimize" code and squeeze few more frames at the cost of consistency.
-Display fixed average fps: least useful number instead of a graph, we dont want to expose our shortcomings.
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how is not a synthetic benchmark though? until they got a game going in their game engine it's synthetic demo.. doesn't matter if they realtime generate lot of the stuff.
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Quite right! It seems synthetic to me as well.
If it generates geometry on the GPU, by using a geometry shader, it makes you wonder:
Do the trees have a physics representation on the CPU as well, so that the player collides with them?
Probably not, which means that despite the marvel of all those trees, you cannot play it like you can a Skyrim world.
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A bit of an oversight - it won't run if security is set to reject unknown developers.
Workaround is to right-click on the icon and choose "Open Application" from the popup menu.
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Makes your argument seem a bit silly now, doesnt it?
Nice (Score:2)
Wait (Score:1)
Since when did Linux count as a "major operating system"?
(I kid, I kid - it's just odd that a) they support it and b) the summary doesn't mention it specifically, given that this is /.)
Impressive (Score:2)
Like SpeedTree (Score:2)
Nice. Reminds me of Speedtree's demos. [youtube.com]
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I'm guessing I shouldn't use Nouveau for this
Yes, you are probably on the right tracks. I believe that error message comes up because the application is trying to request a higher OpenGL profile than what is supported by your graphics driver.
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TODO: make error messages more informative for the end user.
I suppose that in an ideal world, the gamer would program his own games, and contribute well-crafted bug fixes to the games of others, but diagnosing this error effectively requires either sorting through a google search of hundreds of web pages or learning the guts of glx.
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Set 1920x1080 fullscreen video mode
X Error of failed request: GLXBadFBConfig
Major opcode of failed request: 154 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 34 ()
Serial number of failed request: 50
Current serial number in output stream: 49
AL lib: ReleaseALC: 1 device not closed
Any ideas?
This is because Nouveau doesn't do OpenGL 3.2. You will have the same error with the linux Intel drivers for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Not a hardware thing, it's a driver support issue.
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Why the obsession with faking a physical camera? (Score:5, Interesting)
Very nice. But I'm really curious: why do video sims have this obsession with pretending to be shot on a physical camera (e.g. rain drops on the "lens", lens flare when looking at the sun)?
I understand it's an aesthetic but it comes over as insecurity: "hey I bet you couldn't tell this wasn't a real camera in a real world". I think sim designers should have more confidence and get over this 'trying to prove we're as good as the real world by simulating failings in cameras'. I think there's some really nice work and they should concentrate on improving their presentation of world rather than trying to reverse engineer the failings of old cameras.
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying. Don't spend energy trying to simulate it, or lens flare. Spend your time improving your new format, do cool stuff the real film makers can't do and take advantage that you're not bound by their limitations. Please don't work on a virtual camera operator's hand cleaning your virtual lens with a virtual disposable tissue when it rains hard....
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Must admit, things like lens flare and rain on the lens make it look *less* realistic to me. Don't simulate what a camera would see, but what a human eye would see. I want to see a virtual world as if I was right there, not watching a nature documentary.
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why use such crap effects?
well, for same reason some movies use them when they could avoid them. you can get away with less actual detail in the scene.
why do you think so many games nowadays use focal effects? well duh.. it used to be common technique to just limit angle of camera to scene in games.. you don't have to draw the sky if you can never look at it. the focal focus shit effect used in so many games nowadays is usually used to blur backgrounds into blur.. like used in some movies to make the painte
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Any professional cinematographer or photographer can almost always avoid lens flare, mist or water on the lens, but use it intentionally to convey things that the (audio)visual medium can't: heat and glare of bright lights, the sensation of cold wetness when you emerge from water or are caught out in the rain.
It can certainly be overdone, but used right it's just another tool to tell a multisensory story with pictures.
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Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying
Heh. You clearly don't wear glasses. Raindrops on the lens is absolutely normal to me, so it doesn't seem even slightly out of place when I see it in a game.
I agree that lens flare is annoying, though.
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It's worse in 1st person games where you are supposed to be looking through the characters eyes, and yet you still get droplet splashes and lens flair effects (I'm looking at you, MW3).
To be fair I do get the droplets on my glasses sometimes, but then again I'm not a cool uber-l33t soldier dude who would undoubtedly wear contact lenses.
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And when water gets in his eyes he'll blink and close. Yes that would definitely be less annoying.
I HATE lens flare (Score:2)
I'm supposed to be there, I'm not supposed to be looking at things from a camera, get this right once and for all.
history (Score:1)
would love to see this video's 2003, 1993 equivalent.. any good archives of graphics demos around?
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off-scene/pouet, there's Separable Subsurface Scattering (Real Time) [vimeo.com]. semi-raytracingish, there's Rigid Gems [sakura.ne.jp]
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Someone did a ray-traced video of Quake (not real time, of course) with people running around with multiple color sources and so on.
They estimated a real-time version would require a 30,000 GHz processor. Still, it looked awesome.
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Here's the closest thing I've seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bHpUljLVrc [youtube.com]
It's a bunch of benchmark videos saved into one long youtube video. Boring to sit through, but interesting to jump around in.
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How can I purchase (Score:2)
mineral rights to that place? It would look so pretty with a big 'ol pipeline running across it!
Non-violent game (Score:2)
Not just about detail & scale: realistic geo/b (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing that impresses me the most is the way that whoever put it together actually knows some geology and biology. The trees, other plants, and rocks are realistically placed. I admit it's kind of geeky, but as a geologist it always bothers me when game designers think any old "random pile of rocks" or "randomly bumpy cliff surface" corresponds to the way geological materials behave in the real world. Same for the shape of mountainsides. They are not randomly steep, planar slopes. Most of them have a graceful exponential kind of curvature. There are similar issues for the distribution of real plants and trees.
If the whole point of a game is to immerse you in an alternate reality, but everything in the "natural" world looks (to the experienced eye) like the building equivalent of walking through a funhouse, it kind of spoils the effect. These people are meticulously observant of nature and actually know what they are doing! Kudos.
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I did this landscape by a process called "procedural generation":
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-lPWscdDzXM8/TjtfFx12uRI/AAAAAAAACqc/gIukXZ8t0Sc/s1600/TerrainFracta+2l.jpg [googleusercontent.com]
Rather than place hills and grass individually, it uses fractal formulas to create the shapes and textures. The formulas and textures are height and slope aware, and it uses atmospheric haze to give a distance effect. The software is E-on Vue, which is used in professional movie making, but I just diddled around with it for fun.
I was making landscapes like that (Score:1)
Reverse slashdot effect (Score:1)