Oxide Games’ mouth-watering tech demonstration of their new proprietary engine has finally reached Steam in the form of the Star Swarm Benchmark. It uses both AMD’s Mantle and DirectX.
Up to 10k units can be on screen in a mighty space fleet battle between two AIs, with each starship individually acquiring targets. It’s time to give the Nitrous engine a whirl.
The best performance will be given by Mantle, but it fully supports DirectX albeit with some settings recommended to be switched off. It’s an entirely free benchmark.
Check out the Star Swarm Benchmark on Steam. CAUTION: Requires Stardock account and appears to be using an activation process that has no place in the 21st Century.
”Star Swarm is a real-time demo of Oxide Games’ Nitrous engine, which pits two AI-controlled fleets against each other in a furious space battle. Originally conceived as an internal stress test, Oxide decided to release Star Swarm so that the public can share our vision of what we think the future of gaming can be.”
”The simulation in Star Swarm shows off Nitrous’ ability to have thousands of individual units onscreen at once, each running their own physics, AI, pathfinding, and threat assessments.”
”Note that Star Swarm is not a deterministic simulation – the AI and everything else is being computed in real time, so you will get slightly different results from multiple executions even on the same hardware. Unfortunately, achieving 100% determinism with the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous engine is an unrealistic goal.”
Oxide Games tease that the Nitrous engine is already in use for three game projects; one with Oxide, another is Stardock’s Star Control reboot and the third with Mohawk Games’ upcoming Mars project.
