Unigine Valley & Unigine Heaven 4.0 Coming Next Week

Unigine Corp will be announcing next week the release of Unigine Valley 1.0 and the 4.0 update to their very popular cross-platform Unigine Heaven technology demo. Unigine Valley is an incredibly beautiful tech demo of the Unigine Engine coming to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems. In this article is an exclusive preview of Unigine Valley as well as the significant Unigine Heaven 4.0 update.

Unigine Corp was kind enough to grant Phoronix exclusive preview rights to Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Unigine Valley 1.0, as long-standing partners to prep the new test profiles for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Unigine Heaven 4.0 is scheduled for its public release on 12 February and Unigine Valley 1.0 on 14 February. On launch-day through the Phoronix Test Suite you will be able to easily run: phoronix-test-suite benchmark unigine-heaven unigine-valley for running these beautiful new OpenGL tech demos for benchmarking. Be sure to give them a try as JPEG screenshots cannot do justice for showing the incredible visual quality offered by the latest Unigine Engine advancements. The screenshots in this article are also of the pre-release versions of Heaven and Valley.

Unigine Valley is particularly fascinating and was first shown in October of 2011. This tech demo is beautiful going back to the original video of it and the state the Unigine Engine is in now makes this tech demo even more incredible. You need a very high-end graphics card with the latest proprietary graphics drivers for Unigine Valley to work well, but if so, it's a beautiful masterpiece. It's absolutely stunning! Yes, Valley is what I was hinting about on Twitter this weekend.

Before showing off some new Valley screenshots and talking about this tech demo, first up is the Unigine Heaven 4.0 update due out on Tuesday. Over Unigine Heaven 3.0, the 4.0 release adds in:

- Support for GPU temperature and GPU clock monitoring into the software itself (though if you're using the Phoronix Test Suite, all of these system software and hardware sensors have already been available for any test profile via the MONITOR=all environment variable).
- Drastic improvements to the visual quality of SSDO (Scene Space Directional Occlusion).
- Stars are now rendered at nighttime.
- Improved lens flare.
- Improved detection of multiple GPUs.
- Various bug-fixes.

Those are the key changes for Unigine Heaven 4.0. There's also some other less notable changes like anti-aliasing support under Mac OS X and Russian/Chinese localization support, but the above-listed features are the main 4.0 highlights.

Benchmarks of Unigine Heaven 4.0 (compared to Unigine Heaven 3.0 and other OpenGL tech demos for Linux) will be published on Tuesday when the update is officially released.

Now onto the incredible Unigine Valley...