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It's only been a day since Windows 7 officially released, and there is less than a handful of games that currently support DirectX 11, but there is now a benchmark available to gamers to see how well their hardware performs.

Developed by Unigine Corp using its proprietary Unigine engine technology, Heaven the first benchmark that measures the performance of DirectX 11 while showcasing its beauty. System requirements are shown after the jump along with a video of what the benchmark looks like.

Features include:

• Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• ATI Eyefinity support

Download Unigine 'Heaven' DirectX 11 Benchmark (127 MB)

We suspected that AMD might wait until the Windows 7 launch date to release its regular monthly driver updates for its ATI Radeon graphics cards, and we were right. The Catalyst 9.10 drivers are now available for download from AMD's gaming web site.

The release notes for the new drivers give the 411 on what's new, improved and fixed in this release. One of the new features is a new anti-aliasing method called Super Sampling that AMD claims will improve image quality for its ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics card (the only ones that currently support DirectX11) while still allowing for solid performance. There are also some bugs addressed for games like Ghostbusters and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

AMD has the current edge over its main rival Nvidia in the PC graphics card race. AMD's new DirectX11-based cards under their ATI brand are out now while Nvidia's DirectX11 cards are not expected to launch until sometime in early 2010. However, Nvidia is apparently prepping some kind of new graphics card product for a launch this fall.

This week Nvidia sent out invites for people to come to their Santa Clara, California offices on October 30 for a Halloween-themed launch event that will introduce "a rocking new graphics card designed by NVIDIA and EVGA to take PhysX to the next level." That's all we know at this point but if you happen to be in the area on that date there may still be time to send in your RSVP.

We are just days away from the launch of Windows 7 and the official launch of DirectX11. But maybe you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to get one of those new AMD graphics cards that support DirectX11 features. Fear not, however, as AMD has just announced two new cards that are designed for the more budget minded PC gamer who still wants to have high end graphics.

The ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card (shown to the left) and the ATI Radeon HD 5750 card both support DirectX11 and early reviews from hardware sites indicate that both cards give a lot of performance bang for the buck. In this case the bucks come to between $109-$159. Meanwhile Nvidia still has yet to release their own DirectX11 card and likely won't be able to until sometime in 2010.

PC graphics chip maker Nvida held a big press event this week to introduce folks to what you see above. That is their all new GPU architecture that they have code-named "Fermi". With 512 CUDA cores inside, the technology behind the Fermi architecture will be the basis for the next generation of GeForce-based graphics cards.

Which is all well and good but where are those cards? As we reported recently rival AMD has begun shipping their own next-gen cards which are the first to have true DirectX11 support. HardOCP posts up a quote from Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang who states, " Nobody likes when the competition has a product. I don't like keeping our enthusiast waiting on our next generation processors. I would rather be shipping today, but we will ship when the product is ready to ship." However speculation on many hardware web sites state we may have to wait until sometime in the first quarter of 2010 before Nvidia has an actual shipping card with the Fermi technology. That gives AMD a pretty big head start.

Even though the official release of Windows 7 is still three weeks away or so, the very first PC game with support for the OS's new DirectX11 3D graphics API is already out there right now. And believe it or not it's BattleForge, the free-to-play fantasy RTS game from Electronic Arts and its developer EA Phenomic.

The patch to enable DirectX11 support was in fact released last week to its users and according to BattleForge's official web site the patch will allow the game to "have a higher frame rate and new ways of creating graphical effects, such as shadows and lighting" on DirectX11 based PCs. Of course, most players of the game won't notice the difference at all. That's because the DirectX11 support requires both Windows 7 to be installed (Windows Vista will also support DirectX11 but that support has yet to be enabled) and a DirectX11-based video card be a part of the gaming rig. At the moment only two video graphics chips support DirectX11 and they both come from AMD. Graphics cards based on the company's ATI Radeon HD 5870 chip went on sale just last week and cards based on the the ATI Radeon HD 5850 goon sale today.

They have been teasing us for some time but today AMD announced their first fully supported DirectX11 graphics card. The AMD RadeonHD 5800 series of graphics chips have up to up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power on just one card. It also has support for the recently announced ATI Eyefinity technology that will allow up to six monitors to be run on just one graphics card.

AMD will release two Radeon HD 5800 graphics cards at first. One is the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the other is the ATI Radeon HD 5850. Both will come with 1 GB of memory. The Radeon HD 5870 card is now available from several different graphics card companies with a price of $379.99

It's been a busy week for AMD. They have been revealing more info about their plans for a DirectX11 graphics product (and two more PC games that will support DirectX11) and they introduced their Eyefinity multi-monitor technology. Now the company has released new Catalyst drivers for their ATI Radeon graphics chip products.

The new Catalyst 9.9 drivers come in Windows XP, Vista and 7 flavors. There are a few new improvements and features for PC games in this newest release including adding anti-aliasing support for Ghostbusters, ATI CrossfireX support for the upcoming PC port of Resident Evil 5 and fixing a graphics corruption bug in The Sims 3.

Are you rich? If so do you feel that one or two or even three monitors on your gaming PC set up is not enough? How do you feel about SIX monitors running your PC game? Better still, how about 24 FREAKING PC MONITORS? Think it's impossible? AMD says, "Nope, just really expensive". This week the PC processor and graphics chip maker showed off their upcoming ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology that will be put into their next-generation graphics chip this fall.

Simply put, just one graphics card with this technology will be enough to power up to six monitors at the same time. If you have four ATI graphics cards in CrossFire set-up . . . you can do the math. Yep, that means support for up to 24 PC monitors at once. HardOCP seemed very impressed with the technology at AMD's press event. We can't wait to see someone set this kind of monitor set up at a future QuakeCon.

As hinted by AMD last week, the PC graphics and processor maker is starting to talk about its next generation graphics chips under its ATI Radeon brand. In a new blog post on the AMD web site they talk about how their new graphics chips support the DirectX11 API which will launch when Microsoft releases their new OS Windows 7 on October 22.

The blog talks about some of the features that DirectX11 adds to the graphics for PC games such as tessellation (increasing the number of triangles to produce a more lifelike image on screen), multithreaded rendering (allowing DirectX11 to use more of the multi-cores in current and future CPUs) and DirectCompute (allowing for easier access to the GPUs cores for faster performance).

AMD claims it will be the first company to release a "fully compliant and enabled DirectX 11 graphics product" but details on the release have not yet been revealed. However, AMD did offer up an update on what PC games will have support for DirectX11. One was already revealed a few months ago in Dirt 2. In addition the upcoming first person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat will support DirectX11. Finally, in a bit of a surprise, the already released free-to-play RTS game Battleforge will also support DirectX11 (presumably via an upcoming patch).