New Supertuxkart Beta Lands New Graphics Engine, Uses OpenGL 3.1+

Supertuxkart 0.8.2 is now in beta. While v0.8.2 might not sound like a huge milestone from the numbers, it actually is. This Supertuxkart beta lands their new graphics engine that relies upon OpenGL 3.1+ for rendering.

Supertuxkart, the Mariokart-inspired racing game, looks incredibly good with its new renderer especially for being an open-source title. Antartica is the name of the new graphics engine that handles shader-based rendering and a load of features not found in Supertuxkart's original GL1-era engine. Now Intel Sandy Bridge graphics or newer are needed to handle Supertuxkart and the game developers recommend using the proprietary Linux GPU drivers for best performance.

Besides landing the new engine there's several new tracks and prep work for getting networked racing support done in a follow-up release.

More details on this huge update to Supertuxkart can be found via this blog post. The old SuperTuxKart could be used for benchmarking and hopefully this new beta will still work for automated benchmarking so I can deliver some performance tests for this GL3 renderer.