An Exclusive Preview Of Unigine's OilRush Game

For those of you that have ran Unigine's Heaven benchmark (and also the lesser-demanding Unigine Tropics), you know what to expect in terms of this game engine's graphical capabilities. Needless to say, with OilRush the game visuals are top-notch and everything looks great, but it will definitely take full advantage of your hardware and then some. The screenshots in this preview were taken on an Ubuntu 10.10 Linux system with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 and Intel Core i7 970 processor with the settings near-maxed.

As the Unigine developers haven't done all of their passes at optimizing the game yet for performance, we'll hold off for now on talking about that in much detail or delivering any benchmarks. The internal draft of the OilRush manual cites the minimum hardware requirements as being a 2GHz CPU, 1GB of system memory, and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or ATI Radeon HD 2600 series graphics card. Though if you are a serious gamer you will definitely want much more powerful hardware. For those Linux gamers, you will also need to be using the proprietary NVIDA or ATI/AMD Linux GPU drivers as the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers simply won't cut it and it will likely be some time before those open-source drivers can even handle running OilRush let alone at a modest frame-rate.

More information concerning this real-time strategy game from Unigine Corp will be published as soon as we have had additional time to complete our testing. For those not familiar with the objective of the game itself, more details can be found on OilRush-Game.com. You may also be interested in our interview with the Unigine developers from last year.

By early 2011 we would suspect Unigine Corp will publicly announce more details on their planned March launch including the pre-order process to provide beta access. If you have any questions about OilRush, drop by our forums where we can provide additional information and where Denis Shergin, the CEO of Unigine Corp, is also an active member.

Overall we are very excited for the OilRush release as the game is shaping up nicely from the testing thus far and the fact that this will be one of several exciting Linux game releases taking place in 2011 after a rather quiet 2010. Many thanks goes out to Unigine Corp for giving us this exclusive, unprecedented access to their unreleased game as well as their continued Linux support. Among the commercial game studios, Unigine Corp is perhaps the most Linux friendly in ensuring the penguin gamers have a first-rate gaming experience as customers and also taking other strides to bolster Linux gaming like their Linux game development competition to award winning indie game studios with free Unigine Engine licenses.