Nitrous-powered Engine – Star Swarm Benchmark – Released on Steam

For those of you who want to try out how well AMD’s Mantle works, it seems that you are going to like this. The Star Swarm Demo has been released and is available on Steam to be downloaded and stress out your Radeon graphics cards (but not too fast, what about the drivers?).

The Star Swarm Demo is a tech benchmark to showcase the demands of a next generation of real-time strategy. It has the capability to have about 10,000 units on-screen at any given point, all with their respective AIs, Path Finding, Threat Assessment and Physics. Needless to say that this demo is very CPU Intensive. It is here that the Raw Power of AMD’s Mantle is apparent.

Due to its intense CPU and GPU co-operation for a greater increase in efficiency, a fully CPU Bound scenario can get you an uplift of 319%! (Thats unheard off without a hardware update). The performance numbers shared by AMD consists of a 319% increase at 1080p and 281% increase at 1600p, both scenarios set to ‘Extreme’ settings with the AMD A10-7700K and an AMD Radeon R9 290X.

Unfortunately, we cannot just download the benchmark and start testing right now due to the fact that AMD hasn’t yet officially released the Mantle Drivers. However, the bit of good news comes from the Nitrous Engine powering the Star Swam demo. What makes it the best benchmark so far is the battle itself, which is not scripted. It uses mathematical computation and AI recognition – reaction when everything in motion, therefore no benchmark will output the same results. Every battle is unique in its own way, hence different results will be generated every time it runs.

You can download the benchmark from here. Now what we all need to do is wait for AMD to ‘finally’ release the Mantle Drivers.

Thank you WCCF for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of WCCF