Unigine OilRush Officially Ships Today For Linux

For months already pre-releases of the game have been available to those who pre-ordered the game. The cost of the game is only $19.95 USD and is available for instant download. The few screenshots in this article are from the gold copy of OilRush v1.0 that Unigine Corp was kind enough to send over a few days in advance. These screenshots aren't even with the maximum visual settings! The Unigine Engine also supports features like NVIDIA 3D Vision.

The minimum system requirements on this real-time strategy game is a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or ATI Radeon HD 2600 series graphics card with a 2GHz CPU. However, the recommended "sweet spot" for the multi-platform OpenGL game is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or ATI Radeon HD 4850 with 512MB of video memory. The AMD and NVIDIA binary Linux drivers are, of course, recommended.

On the open-source stack if you're using the Gallium3D Radeon / Nouveau drivers, have floating-point textures built into Mesa, are using the external S3TC library, and jump through some other hoops, you might achieve mild success. However, this game's engine is extremely demanding with its OpenGL 3/4 renderer and the best performance is found with the binary blobs at this point. Hopefully in the coming releases of the Linux kernel DRM and Mesa they will be in better shape to support the Unigine Engine, but right now the engine is simply too advanced for the open-source stack. With Mac OS X you even need to be using Mac OS X 10.7.0+ "Lion" in order for its Apple graphics drivers to be fit.