Unigine Heaven Offers Heavenly Graphics

Our friends at Unigine Corp have today unveiled their "Heaven" benchmark, and the graphics capabilities in this tech demo are heavenly to say the least. Last year Unigine Corp had unveiled the Unigine Tropics benchmark / tech demo in the Phoronix Test Suite and it certainly set a new OpenGL precedent on Linux.

While no native Linux games are out yet that use the multi-platform Unigine game engine, it remains the most demanding engine we have found and boasts the best graphics capabilities. Unigine Tropics is still great (as is the earlier Unigine Sanctuary demo too), but Unigine Heaven takes it one step further. Heaven incorporates many engine updates (talked about in different news postings) that these Russian developers have been working on for months. Here's their YouTube video of Unigine Heaven.

This video is, of course, demonstrating Unigine Heaven using their new DirectX 11.0 renderer. Unigine Heaven is using hardware tessellation, DirectCompute, Shader Model 5.0, and other newer GPU technologies. Unigine released this demo today for the launch of the Microsoft Windows 7, but there remains the OpenGL 3.x renderer too. Take a look at the Unigine Heaven press release. The Linux version of Unigine Heaven isn't out yet, but it's expected soon. We have heard that driver problems is what set back the Linux release, but it's coming and will certainly be stressing OpenGL drivers and hardware.

Besides the graphics getting even better, other recent advancements in this game engine include improved physics, volumetric clouds, improved shaders, and many other changes. This Linux-friendly engine also now supports OpenGL 3.2 rendering.

Work on this heaven tech demo and their DirectX 11.0 support is what had set back Unigine's game under development, which will support Linux, but now hopefully we will see work on this project get back on track.

When the Linux version of Unigine Heaven is released expect full coverage on Phoronix and it will also be appearing in the Phoronix Test Suite for Linux benchmarking on the same-day. More on the work behind the Unigine Engine can be found in our Unigine Corp Q&A.