Unigine Heaven 2.0 Launches For Linux

Unigine Heaven has finally arrived! Unigine Heaven, a tech demo / benchmark that offers heavenly graphics and was released for Windows 7 back in October with a DirectX 11 renderer, is now available on Linux with its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. As we suspected, the Linux support has arrived with the release of Unigine Heaven 2.0, which includes an updated Windows binary as well.

Heaven 2.0 has heavier tessellation load, major optimizations to the engine, new elaborated objects in the world, physics-driven flags, enhancements to old assets, and "moderate" / "extreme" tessellation mode options.

Already we have published Heaven Linux screenshots and benchmarks based upon an internal build of Heaven 1.0 we had back in December. A new article will be out soon though, since that one was sitting in our publishing queue for over three months waiting for this day to finally arrive.

The hold up has been the ATI Catalyst driver not supporting the OpenGL tessellation properly in their Linux driver with the Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards, but this Linux build today actually comes without tessellation support. We have waited about five months, but in the end, Unigine Corp ended up turning off the tessellation support.

Denis Shergin, the CEO of Unigine, shared with us this afternoon: "Hardware tessellation isn't working in Linux yet. The good news is that there are new OpenGL extensions available for tessellation and they seem to be vendor-unbiased, so we hope to see their full support in NVIDIA and ATI Linux drivers really soon."

Unigine Heaven (along with their earlier Sanctuary and Tropics demos) can be found on their download page. All of the Unigine tests are also available through the Phoronix Test Suite. There is already a unigine-heaven test profile we wrote based upon the internal build we have access to, we should just need to drop in the download link and be set.

After you've tried out this new Linux tech demo share with us your thoughts in our forums. Coincidentally, thanks to a PHXCMS update made today, you can easily slide through the screenshots from this page.