Unigine 2.15 Continues As One Of The Most Beautiful Engines, Vulkan Still W.I.P.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unigine 2.15 Continues As One Of The Most Beautiful Engines, Vulkan Still W.I.P.

While there hasn't been much to talk about Unigine recently when it comes to Linux games and they seem to place less emphasis these days on Unigine as a game engine, this cross-platform SDK/engine continues to be visually quite stunning, their Linux support remains in good shape, and they appear to be enjoying very successful efforts on the commercial simulation side. Unigine 2.15 was released this week as the latest iteration of their engine...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unigine-2.15

[perpetually high]

After setting up my new 5800X / 6700XT system recently, I ran Superposition to see how smooth it would be and man, that's a beautiful benchmark.

Edit: I also made the jump from a ViewSonic 1080p TN panel 144hz to a ViewSonic 1440p IPS 144hz, and dang, it's really nice. I see why everyone makes a big stink about 1440p. 78% more pixels than 1080p and it's noticeable. I hate to be that guy now but 1080p looks blurry 🤣 crazy how that works. But I guess I *could* go back to 1080p, but you'd have to give me a pretty compelling reason and I wouldn't do it voluntarily whatsoever. It's one of those things like upgrading to an SSD or experiencing 60hz -> 144hz. It's nice.

[intelfx]

After setting up my new 5800X / 6700XT system recently, I ran Superposition to see how smooth it would be and man, that's a beautiful benchmark.

Edit: I also made the jump from a ViewSonic 1080p TN panel 144hz to a ViewSonic 1440p IPS 144hz, and dang, it's really nice. I see why everyone makes a big stink about 1440p. 78% more pixels than 1080p and it's noticeable. I hate to be that guy now but 1080p looks blurry 🤣 crazy how that works. But I guess I *could* go back to 1080p, but you'd have to give me a pretty compelling reason and I wouldn't do it voluntarily whatsoever. It's one of those things like upgrading to an SSD or experiencing 60hz -> 144hz. It's nice.

Wait until you get 4K.

[sdack]

While I share the excitement over improvements by Unigine does the image with the tank look pretty dull. The mud has the same colour everywhere and so do the trees. It is the same brown and green and it is rather unimpressive.

The Mars impression does not exactly knock me off my feet either, but Mars is a big rock and it is hard to judge a planet one has never been to. It looks dull enough to be realistic, but may actually be unrealistic.

The water surface with its distinct waveforms and the detailed sun reflections looks alright though.

[FireBurn]

Wait until you get 4K.

I was kinda upset I had to downgrade the 4k (60hz) screen of my Alienware 15, to the 1440p (165hz) screen of the Asus Advantage Edition but I do like the higher refresh rate

Hopefully the next upgrade I'll be back to 4k again, my old M395X was never powerful enough to properly game at 4k resolutions anyway, where as gaming at 1440p on the 6800M is smooth as butter

[tildearrow]

Sadly, it's more like a benchmark engine, with very few games actually using it.

But they market heavily to professional applications, so...

[shmerl]

Wait until you get 4K.

I'd say high refresh rate > high resolution. So 4K isn't there yet. But when GPUs will be able to handle framerates that can saturate 4K with 144 Hz and up, that would be really neat.

I'm currently using 2560x1440 / 180 Hz LG display and Cyberpunk runs with RX 6800 XT at around 75-80 fps (max settings except screen space reflection on Ultra). So surely 4K is still not a good option yet for current gen GPUs and such demanding games.

[skeevy420]

After setting up my new 5800X / 6700XT system recently, I ran Superposition to see how smooth it would be and man, that's a beautiful benchmark.

Edit: I also made the jump from a ViewSonic 1080p TN panel 144hz to a ViewSonic 1440p IPS 144hz, and dang, it's really nice. I see why everyone makes a big stink about 1440p. 78% more pixels than 1080p and it's noticeable. I hate to be that guy now but 1080p looks blurry 🤣 crazy how that works. But I guess I *could* go back to 1080p, but you'd have to give me a pretty compelling reason and I wouldn't do it voluntarily whatsoever. It's one of those things like upgrading to an SSD or experiencing 60hz -> 144hz. It's nice.

I was the same way with 4K until I upgraded my TV. 1080p is perfectly adequ....OMG, WTF have I been missing out on? On my TV 1080p upscaled looks better than just 1080p due to not having non-native resolution blur. It's also why I play less games on Linux these days. The AMD software makes dealing with 1080p>4K scaling a lot easier than on Linux and, with most every game I have, 1080p>4K through the AMD software works better than playing the game in 4K and setting it to 50% or 66% (varies by game as to which % means 1080p). It's just easier letting Windows/AMD driver catch the exclusive fullscreen call and automatically integer upscaling that for me. All I have to do is set my game to a resolution that scales into 4K and I'm golden unlike Linux where I have to do it all manually via xrandr and custom launch commands and Wine FSR for non-native games. I haven't even bothered gaming on my current Manjaro install (about a month old now) because it's just easier to reboot into Windows....speaking of which, I just realized it's free Epic game time.

That said, I'd rather downgrade to a 2K FreeSync monitor since I'm rocking a 4GB 580 and it looks like I'll be using it for another year-ish. 2KFS is the best my GPU can handle. Unfortunately they don't make a 55" 2K panel with FreeSync in the $200-$400 range so I'll be sticking with what I have until the GPU shortage is figured out. I don't really wanna go from 55" to 23".

[Vistaus]

I'd say high refresh rate > high resolution. So 4K isn't there yet. But when GPUs will be able to handle framerates that can saturate 4K with 144 Hz and up, that would be really neat.

I'm currently using 2560x1440 / 180 Hz LG display and Cyberpunk runs with RX 6800 XT at around 75-80 fps (max settings except screen space reflection on Ultra). So surely 4K is still not a good option yet for current gen GPUs and such demanding games.

It also depends on if the game is optimized or not. For example, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers and Kingdom Rush: Vengeance both have 2560x1440 and 4K options, but everything is scaled up, so you cannot actually make use of the extra screen real estate.

[coder]

I've got to hand it to the Unigine devs for making such nice benchmark/demos. I always run them, whenever I install a new GPU.

I wish other engine makers did this.

FWIW, I also sometimes run 3D Mark on Windows & Android, but that's not free and they use their own engine, rather than one anyone actually uses for games/apps.