Unigine Heaven For Linux Status Update

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux. What pushed back their Linux release was waiting on functional Linux drivers from AMD that would allow their demo to run with the tessellation mode enabled without causing a bunch of visual artifacts. They hoped AMD would have a fixed Catalyst Linux driver release in a month or two.

Hearing from Unigine Corp this morning, that fixed driver release will arrive in January, which would mean Catalyst 10.1. Unigine Corp though is debating on whether to release Unigine Heaven for Linux earlier than that, just without the tessellation support, which decreases the graphics quality, but still, this tech demo will be amazing considering their OpenGL 3.2 support and other improvements made to the engine after their last non-tessellated Unigine Tropics and Sanctuary demos last year.

Besides that, for the tessellation functionality you will need DirectX 11 grade hardware (such as AMD's Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" series GPUs, like the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770) or NVIDIA's GeForce GT 300 "Fermi" series once released. This hardware isn't exactly widespread at the moment, so most Linux users already will be limited to running the non-tessellated version of Unigine Heaven.

This setback though means that a benchmarking test profile for Unigine Heaven will not ship with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 when released next week. If Unigine Heaven is released this year still, a point release will be released for Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 carrying this unigine-heaven test profile otherwise it will be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" next quarter.