Unigine Does Terrain Tessellation, Confirms OS X Plans

While Unigine's pre-release orders for OilRush aren't going in a steadfast manner (right now they're up to only 899 pre-orders; +91 from yesterday), they aren't getting discouraged by these initial sales figures. The Russian developers continue work on further enhancing their advanced 3D engine.

Today they have offered up a new development update where the biggest addition to the renderer is now supporting hardware tessellation for terrains rather than strips to simple triangles. There are also other decail and terrain enhancements too with their latest revision, which is available to their game studio clients.

This development log also confirms their plans to provide Mac OS X support for the Unigine Engine, following their Windows, Linux, Android, and PlayStation 3.0 support. This is after yesterday I mentioned Mac OS X support would be coming.

In talking with Unigine Corp this morning, I've also found out they are now working on a Mac OS X version of the Unigine Engine and there will be a native OS X client for OilRush too. This advanced engine is already compatible with Windows, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Android, so it shouldn't be a huge task porting it to Mac OS X with its OpenGL renderer. I've heard the port may even be done this month, but it could also be a question of how well the AMD/NVIDIA Mac OS X drivers can handle this very demanding 3D engine. At least the Apple drivers are getting beaten into shape thanks to Steam and the Source Engine, but there isn't much change with the Mac OS X 10.7 benchmarks from the first developer preview.

Whether any of Unigine's tech demos / benchmarks will be released for Mac OS X is still being decided.

Anyone want to bet that they will also be porting this beautiful engine over to Apple's iOS devices for the A5-powered iPad 2 and iPhone 5? They already have it for Android, but it requires NVIDIA's TEGRA2 platform for the demanding compute and graphics requirements.

Unigine OilRush is slated for release in June.