Unigine Superposition Is A Beautiful Way To Stress Your GPU In 2017, 17-Way Graphics Card Comparison

It's already been seven years since Unigine Corp rolled out the Unigine Heaven tech demo and four years since Unigine Valley while in that time while we have seen thousands of Linux game ports emerge, but few can match the visual intensity of these tech demos. In looking to set a new standard for jaw-dropping graphics and preparing to torture current Pascal and Polaris graphics cards as well as future Volta and Vega hardware, Unigine Corp today is releasing Unigine Superposition 1.0. Unigine Superposition is one godly GPU benchmark and is a beauty to watch.

Unigine Superposition is the company's first tech demo / benchmark built atop their Unigine 2 engine. Superposition has incredible visuals, their first tech demo with a VR mode supporting the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and works on both Windows and Linux systems.

First, two important notes. Unigine is working on VR Linux support for the HTC Vive but today's 1.0 Linux build has the VR support disabled. A lot of you are also likely wondering about Vulkan with Superposition. Unigine Superposition is currently OpenGL-only on Linux while Windows has Direct3D 11 and OpenGL options. Unigine Corp is still exploring Vulkan and as such there isn't yet any support in Superposition or Unigine 2 yet for this new graphics API. The OpenGL renderer for Superposition requires OpenGL 4.5.

Here's the Unigine teaser for Superposition if you haven't yet checked it out:

Superposition is very demanding on current generation graphics hardware but is still rather future-proof in being able to firmly stress future hardware. One of the visual features added that's catered toward future GPU generations is SSRTGI (screen-space ray-traced global illumination), which they will be revealing more about it at SIGGRAPH.

I've been testing out Superposition the past number of weeks under Linux and it's certainly the most visually impressive tech demo / application / game I've yet to see running on Linux, even with its OpenGL usage. And yes, it's very taxing on the hardware. For those curious about the performance expectations if running this tech demo on Linux, on the following pages I've included a number of benchmarks from 17 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.