Oxide Games has released today the first look at its next-generation Nitrous engine, Star Swarm. The engine demo, freely available for Windows PC through Steam, demonstrates the ability of Nitrous-powered games to simulate and display thousands of high-detail units in a single scene.
Star Swarm is also one of the first publicly available demonstrations of AMD’s groundbreaking Mantle technology, which runs on AMD graphics chips based on the Graphics Core Next architecture. By reducing the processing power wasted on traditional driver overhead, Mantle allows Nitrous to realize significant performance gains. In real-world terms, Mantle systems running Star Swarm can sustain playable framerates with higher graphical fidelity than non-Mantle configurations.
Though not a game itself, Star Swarm is a demonstration of the new types of game designs that Nitrous enables. “We can’t wait to see what game developers are able to do when they can count on thousands of units all running individual AI and physics, rather than limiting their designs to a relative handful of objects at a time,” said Oxide Games co-founder Tim Kipp.
Nitrous is available for licensing by external game development studios, and already has three games in active production using the technology. Stardock’s Star Control reboot, Oxide Games’ own unannounced game, and the first title from Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson’s Mohawk Games run on Nitrous. All three games are published by Stardock.
“Nitrous is already opening up endless development possibilities for our future games,” said Stardock’s CEO and President, Brad Wardell. “As a game developer and strategy fan, no one is more excited about this than I am.”
Official Website: http://www.oxidegames.com/nitrous
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/267130/
AMD Hardware Requirements: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/
Engine Demo – Trailer:
Screenshots:
