Unvanquished 0.56 is out today as the latest major update to this prominent open-source, community-driven shooter game. Unvanquished continues progressing after more than a decade in development for this open-source game and with today’s v0.56 release features improved visuals, OpenMP for CPU-based rendering of skeletal models, and other enhancements.
Unvanquished 0.56 ships with many renderer improvements to its Daemon engine. This update introduces their linear blend regime for improved lighting, the FXX anti-aliasing mode is now working better than before, better looking (and more efficient) fog effects, and other OpenGL rendering enhancements.
The Unvanquished game update also brings enhancements to its audio system, UI enhancements, and bringing OpenMP support to the Daemon engine for multi-threaded CPU-based rendering of skeletal models. The Unvanquished 0.56 announcement explains of the OpenMP usage for helping low-end hardware:
“An example of actual GPUs from the market that benefit from this OpenMP work is the Chinese MTT S80 from Moore Threads. Despite having a raw power comparable to a RX 6700XT in some aspects (so, close to an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5), and supporting OpenGL 4+, for some reasons it exposes some “max vertex uniforms” limitations similar to some 2.1 GPUs from the early 2000’s, probably a side-effect of its PowerVR-based architecture which is usually found in mobile devices, not in discrete PCIe cards for gaming PCs. Owners of such devices can use the “Ultra” graphics preset but are recommended to enable the “Low“ model quality option so the engine dispatches more models to the GPU while the processing of remaining models dispatched on CPU will enlist many threads to speed-up the work thanks to OpenMP.
Illwieckz also did some rewriting of this fallback model CPU code for it using cheapest but faster variants of some computations to speed it a bit more.
OpenMP may be used in the future to speed up more things benefiting more people, be it at loading time (decompressing multiple images at the same time, maybe?) or at render time (particles may benefit from it for example, but would require some deeper rewrite first). OpenMP is now enabled by default in Linux and Windows release builds, starting with Dæmon 0.56.”
Downloads and more details on today’s Unvanquished 0.56 release via Unvanquished.net. New Unvanquished benchmarks soon.
