Can you count to 10,000? It’s hard, isn’t it? Well, not only can Star Swarm count to 10,000, it can do it in the middle of a space war with thousands of explosions and battleships flying about the place. That, apparently, is the power or AMD’s Mantle api.
Quite impressive, eh?
Star Swarm is a tech demo of what Oxide’s Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model can achieve.* That said, they are planning on releasing the demo through Steam for us all to see the glory of 5,000 on 5,000 space combat.
Oxide are working on two other games using the Mantle api but, for the moment, they’re keeping shtum about it all.
“Mantle solves a problem PC developers have struggled with for years,” said Oxide co-founder Tim Kipp in a press release we stole from their offices. “We’re closer to the graphics hardware than ever before, which lets us see dramatic increases in performance on Mantle-enabled systems. At the same time, the low cost of including Mantle support doesn’t prevent us from developing Nitrous for all modern graphics hardware, which makes it attractive to us as businesspeople.”
The Nitrous engine makes for an exciting video but I want to see more of what the game itself would be. 10,000 units is a great calling card but there needs to be more to justify it as a game.
*I wonder how long they spent getting an acronym of SWARM together.