Devlog - Heaven DX11 benchmark released

November 02, 2009

What's new:

  • Released the first DirectX 11 benchmark on the basis of Unigine.
  • '-Os' replaced by '-O3' in GCC flags, which gave a 20% speed boost in Linux.
  • Fixed water artifacts produced by overlaping waves.
  • Line intersection functions for all physics shapes.
  • Fixed detail textures with SRGB enabled.
  • Added access to image pixels via C++ API.
  • Vertex cache optimization is now optional (see export plugins settings).
  • Optional axes flip on import in ResourceEditor.
  • Added "frame based" flag for every bone of the ragdoll to mix physics-driven and skinned mesh animations.
  • New Body::setVelocityTransform() function that calculates linear and angular velocities based on the body transformation.
  • Fixed a rare startup crash caused by multi-threading access to archived files.
  • More verbose XML parser.
  • Fixed saving of materials into nodes.
  • 'restitution' and 'softness' joint parameters splitted into linear_restitution / angular_restitution and linear_softness / angular_softness (don't forget to run the upgrade script).
  • Optimized tessellation shaders for DirectX 11.
  • Added documentation on sky ("Principles of Operation / Objects / Sky" section of the manual).

Here are some technical details on how tessellation works under the hood:

Video demonstrating hardware tessellation in action (based on Heaven DX11 benchmark content)

Release of the Heaven benchmark attracted a lot of attention in the Net (our webserver has had a near-death experience several times) since there are no DX11 benchmarks so far: news item on Tom's Hardware. Wow, we made it.