Showcases the Power of Mantle API
Welcome to the newest frontier in gaming: battles and scenes at the scale of armies and fleets, all active at once with no trickery around loading screens or off-screen abstractions.
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.
The Nitrous engine is already in use for three games currently in production: an unannounced title from Oxide Games, Stardock’s Star Control reboot, and Mohawk Games’ upcoming game codenamed Mars. Nitrous is also available for licensing to interested game developers.
You’ve got to see it to believe it. Download Star Swarm for free now to see what your gaming PC can do with the next-generation Nitrous engine.
Key Features◾ Up to 10,000 units onscreen at once – Imagine what kind of games can be made when developers can count on simulating battles and scenes at this scale
◾ First look at AMD’s Mantle technology – See the performance benefits of AMD’s new API layer for yourself if you have compatible (Graphics Core Next-based) hardware
◾ Benchmark mode generates performance information – Since Star Swarm is a dynamic simulation rather than a canned demo, run it several times to see what Nitrous’ real-world gaming performance is on your machine
◾ Film-style rendering – Nitrous uses Object Space Lighting, which renders objects onscreen using the same techniques used by the film industry, including real-time film quality motion blur, on your PC
System Requirements Minimum: OS: Windows 7 64-bit / Windows 8 64-bit
Processor: Quad-Core Processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1 GB VRAM (Dedicated) DirectX 11 Compatible Video Card
DirectX: Version 11
Hard Drive: 4 GB available space
Additional Notes: Mantle Benchmark requires an AMD Radeon 7x00 Series Video Card or Better and the AMD Mantle drivers.
AMD Mantle Driver DownloadDownload AMD's Mantle driver here when it becomes available (Graphics Core Next-based hardware required). Mantle is optional; Star Swarm supports DirectX 11 compatible video cards.
For more on this delay Please see:
AMD Confirms Mantle Catalyst Driver Delay – Could be Labeled 14.2 BETA Screen captures:
