Testing (continued):

Unigine Heaven 4.0:

Unigine Heaven 4.0 was used as a gauge of the 3D gaming performance of the cards being tested. It is a DirectX 11 capable benchmark that can really stress a system. It was run with settings on high, no anti-aliasing, and with a resolution of 1280x720 (720p). Two results are provided with the Heaven benchmark, Scores and FPS, and higher values are better for both.

While this benchmark was running, it was a painful site on the two Nvidia cards and the Intel HD solution. I was actually surprised it ran on the Intel HD setup since the specifications detail that you need HD 3000 for it to run. Regardless, the performance on the HD7730 was visibly superior and the scenes were far more fluid and enjoyable to watch. The FPS (frames per second) chart below puts numbers to my observations and shows that the HD7730 was capable of running at close to 5x the frame rate of the other three options.



When it comes to the final score provided by the benchmark we see that the HD7730 was capable of results about 6x that of the other options.



The Windows Experience test told me that the HD7730 was the best for 2D desktop applications and 3D gaming, while the Unigine Heaven test confirmed in fine detail that this is the card for gaming.