Unigine Heaven For Linux May Come Next Week

We have received confirmation from Unigine Corp that with Catalyst 9.12 for Linux now released with its proper OpenGL 3.2 support and bug-fixes, this paves the way for Unigine Heaven to be released possibly as soon as next week.

We previously reported that drivers were the hold-up in Unigine Corp not releasing their Heaven demo that offers heavenly graphics because no drivers at the time could handle their advanced OpenGL 3.2 renderer that comes complete with hardware tessellation support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series, even on Linux. The latest 195.xx NVIDIA Linux driver should end up working with the latest Unigine improvements too, but without any hardware tessellation support until their GeForce GT300 "Fermi" series is released that will offer such support. Don't even bother trying to run Unigine Heaven with the Mesa drivers as it is simply impossible for it to work. Likewise, if you aren't running the latest and greatest hardware, expect sluggish performance.

We are told by Unigine Corp that they are doing some last minute tweaks and we could see the public release of it as soon as next week. We have been testing a recent snapshot of this technology demo / benchmark and it's simply amazing -- by far the most advanced engine available for Linux at this time. We will have more information (and multi-card benchmarks) on Unigine Heaven's Linux launch day.