Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Windows 7 release, software developer Unigine has unleashed the world's first DirectX 11 benchmark unto the world after five years of development, dubbing it 'Heaven.'

Unigine's engine makes use of hardware tesselation, a feature that has been present on ATI graphics card for a few generations, but is now being put to full use. Without going into too much detail, it adds polygons within polygons so developers can use compressed JPEG images without sacrificing image quality. In other words, we get better looking graphics and, best of all, without a performance hit on DirectX 11 hardware. The video below show's tesselation in action compared to low quality textures rendered normally.

As you can see, the benchmark is nothing short of impressive and, surprisingly, performance is actually pretty good.

In case you haven't picked up an HD5000-series card yet, the benchmark is also backward compatible with DirectX 9 and 10 as well as OpenGL. However, only the full blown DirectX 11 can take advantage of the latest features including DirectCompute and tesselation. If you're still riding the XP bandwagon, you will need to upgrade in order to enjoy those latest advancements in graphics technologies.

Oh and if you feel the urge to start your own game studio and use Unigine's product, it's going to cost you right around $25,000. Of course, it's easier to simply pick up an HD5000 card while waiting for one of the upcoming DirectX 11 titles including DiRT 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Aliens vs Predator or the already-released Battleforge.