Star Swarm, the first look at Oxide Games’ next-generation Nitrous engine, is available! Download it now through Steam for free.
See the future of strategy gaming today with thousands of units on screen, powered by the engine behind several upcoming Stardock titles.
The Nitrous engine is a truly next-generation, 64-bit engine that uses techniques pulled from the film industry to take strategy game visuals to the next level. We envision a future where strategy gaming is closer to the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi than two dozen space marines shooting three dozen bugs. Star Swarm is proof that that future is closer than you may have thought.
Star Swarm is also one of the very first looks at AMD’s groundbreaking Mantle technology. Anyone with a Graphics Core Next-based system (basically, running a Radeon 7000 series or newer) can download the beta Mantle drivers from AMD and see the performance gains that can be realized with a forward-thinking graphics API like Mantle.
Download Star Swarm for free from Steam here.
The exciting thing is the concept of using your otherwise 'unused' 7850K integrated GPU for physics calculations and such in games, while your R9 290(x), assuming you end up with one of those, does the heavy lifting! This is one thing that I've seen mentioned several times now r.e. Mantle.
I've seen some Crossfire results already using a R7-240 and R7-250, and there was a performance bump. In that case, the integrated R7 was able to help out a lot. But the whole point of the HSA/HuMA architecture is to allow programmers to use the integrated GPU cores more easily/readily for other things, like number crunching.
Indeed, I never wanted a CPU with an integrated GPU until now.
I know adoption might be limited in that regards for a while, but it's cool anyway.
And the GPU I'm likely to get for Mantle probably won't have TrueAudio but my integrated does so hey. I've long been disappointed with PC gaming audio so that's one of my favorite features.
Holy F$%@! $#@% just got REAL!
Brad, we need a real time cam feed inside Stardock to see all the crazy stuff your doing with this RIGHT NOW!
Just sayin...
Was there a general "UGH" reaction when seeing this and knowing you where too far along in Gal Civ 3 development to use it, or was it still a conscious choice to use what you have now?
I'm having a hard time playing Sins now knowing what its future could be!
Excited for future games from Stardock!
Brad, were you guys going to release more documentation about modding Star Swarm? Cause, you know, kind of hard to reproduce the Battle of Coruscant if we can't insert correct looking models.
I have also done it in D3D using my Catalyst 14.2
I got 100+ fps before major shooting started and 35 to 45 when all .... broke loose.
The fun of having multiple GPUs.
http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Confirms-DirectX-12-Lives-Will-Showcase-Technology-At-GDC/
I know Frogboy has talked about how MS has been behind the times with DirectX and such. Maybe we can hope that DX12 provides some "Mantle-like" capabilities.
Sure, at the cost of using Windows 9
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