I’m not sure why I insist on torturing my computers with all these benchmarks, but if it’s any consolation it seems like a common affliction among hardware geeks. Running Unigine Heaven on my lowly 9600M-equipped laptop wasn’t exactly an encouraging experience, but here’s a new version anyhow.Unigine has taken the opportunity to launch version 2.0 of its performance test Heaven ahead of Nvidia’s Fermi launch. Since AMD/ATI has been on the market for month with DirectX 11 cards it’s about time that Nvidia releases its first cards.

Heaven puts real pressure on the GPU, and even if it’s compatible with DX 9, 10 and OpenGL, DX11 is of course where the new and potentially interesting features are. Unfortunately these cards are still a rare commodity – especially in laptops.

In version 2, Unigine developers have implemented heavier tessellation, more advanced physics, dynamic lighting and some other general improvements. New is also that you can choose three levels of extreme GPU torture: Moderate, normal or extreme.

To find out how far behind your current graphics card is, you can download Heaven 2.0 right away from Unigine. It’s also available for Linux. Here’s how it’s supposed to look:

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