Unigine Takes Advantage Of OpenGL 4.0

It was just shy of a month ago when Unigine Heaven 2.0 was released with Linux support and it showed what Linux gaming can look like while slaughtering your graphics card. Unigine Corp, the company responsible for this multi-platform game engine, though hasn't been sitting around idly since the Heaven 2.0 release, but they have in fact been moving forward with great improvements their game engine.

First of all, the latest Unigine engine code now offers full support for the OpenGL 4.0 specification with its hardware tessellation API. However, an updated version of Unigine Heaven 2 hasn't yet been released atop this updated engine since the ATI/AMD drivers don't hook into this part of the OpenGL spec right now. AMD put out its first OpenGL 4 Linux driver a few days after the Heaven 2.0 release and NVIDIA joined the party a week ago with its OGL4 Linux driver following the GeForce GTX 470/480 launch.

Besides starting to take advantage of the OpenGL 4.0 spec, Unigine developers have also begun work on porting this engine to run on the Sony PlayStation 3. As is mentioned on their development log, "We have good news regarding PlayStation 3 version of Unigine: since we finally got devkits, development is moving very fast, at the moment we have working controls, file system, memory management and can draw meshes."

Other Unigine engine work includes detection of CrossFireX and QuadFireX modes, synchronization of random seeds for particles and clouds, deferred rendering of lights on a per-light basis, and various other core changes.

Now we just need to wait for an updated Unigine Heaven benchmark, the Primal Carnage game to be released (it uses the Unigine engine), and Unigine's new project that will run under Linux to be published.