UniGine is the commercial game making engine that allows you to design multi-platform game environments. As a result and because of its use in the industry, the company has on offer a number of GPU stress testing tools available.
There are a four main benchmark stress testing tools for download: Valley (which is what we're reviewing here), Heaven, Tropic and Sanctuary.
The Valley model has you flying through a peaceful forested valley, with golden motes floating between the foliage and trees and culminating in a storm with lightning strikes and raindrops for added effect - all against the impressive backdrop of a glorious mountain range.
Heaven has you in a steampunk world of floating islands, magical places and mediaeval villages. Tropic is fairly self explanatory, while Sanctuary has you touring a gothic cathedral, with ill-lit corners and plenty of torch light. The four tests are very dramatic, and as well as being visually impressive they do put the GPU, CPU, memory and system through their paces.
From the main UniGine window you can choose your language; a preset graphical test from Custom, Basic, Extreme and Extreme HD; API allows you choose from DirectX 11, 9 or OpenGL, and Quality settings ranging from low, medium, high and ultra. And you're able to opt for stereo 3D, multiple monitors, anti-aliasing, full screen and a choice of resolutions.
Once you run the benchmark, you have a choice of flicking through the preset scenes or taking a walk - or fly - around the 64,000,00 square metre detailed landscape. Meanwhile the frames per second, the model of graphics card you have in the system, its clock speed, available memory and temperature are all displayed in the upper-right corner of the screen.
There are numerous controls along the top that start the system benchmark, alter the camera from static to user controlled, change the environment from a sunny day to a full tropical storm at night and alter the quality settings. You can also turn off the sound effects, in-benchmark music and quit the benchmark altogether.
In the background there's a fairly intensive hardware stability testing going on, along with testing dynamic skies, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF and ambient occlusion. The result, when the benchmark has completed its run of the various scenes, is a score based on the average, minimum and maximum frame-rate depending on the settings used and as configured by the user. There's also a brief summary of the platform and hardware used, as well as the benchmark settings.
The UniGine benchmarks aren't as popular as the 3DMark 11 benchmarks at the moment, but they're still in use by many testers. It would be good therefore to be able to, at a quick glance, see how your system score for the settings compare to other systems. However, it doesn't, so you'll have to go searching for that information yourself.
Still, the UniGine benchmark, in particular the Valley benchmark, is very pretty and absorbing to look at and play around in.