Unigine 2.0 Is In Alpha With Many Changes & OpenGL 4.5 Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 9 October 2014 at 05:18 PM EDT. 13 Comments
LINUX GAMING
Unigine Corp has revealed today that Unigine 2.0 has been under development for about one year and with this major revision to their technologically-amazing but seldom adopted engine is OpenGL 4.5 rendering support and other changes.

Unigine 2.0 is now out in alpha for its customers. Unigine 2.0 supports the brand new OpenGL 4.5 API for rendering while it drops support for older APIs like DirectX 9.0 on Windows and OpenGL ES 2.0. Interestingly, Unigine 2.0 does away with WebGL support and it's also disregarded its PlayStation 3 and WinRT support. The Microsoft code-paths are now focused on DirectX 11+ for rendering.

Among the other renderer improvements is improved terrain rendering, a unified mesh file format support, support for blended shapes, support for vertex colors, experimental support for physically-based rendering, and support for screen-space reflections.

The Unigine 2.0 engine also has other features like NVIDIA Tegra K1 support, a GDAL import plugin for geodata, etc. Last but not least are also Unigine Editor and Unigine Script improvements. Other features still coming for Unigine Engine 2.0 are rendering performance improvements, better anti-aliasing, OpenGL ES 3.0 support, improved light scattering, night vision mode, streamlined content pipeline, geometric waves, and numerous other enhancements.


The Unigine Alpha 2.0 preview announcement can be found at Unigine.com. Given that Unigine is very popular within the simulation space these days while there's no major titles right now running on the game engine version, hopefully at least Unigine Corp will soon release an updated technology demo to look at this visual richness on Linux -- and to stress our graphics cards and drivers to hell.

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