Star Swarm Benchmark is released on Steam

Those who are waiting for the launch of AMD Mantle will have to endure a little longer. Although DICE is ready with an update for Battlefield 4, the associated drivers are still missing, so it is not yet possible to examine the truthfulness of the promises of real performance gains.

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.

Now another piece of the puzzle is added when Oxide Games releases Star Swarm Benchmark on Steam. As the name suggests, this is a performance test based on the upcoming space strategy game Star Swarm with the advanced Nitrous Engine, which makes it possible to investigate the differences between AMD Mantle and Microsoft DirectX.

Unlike many other test programs, Star Swarm Benchmark is not deterministic but uses real game logic to simulate space battles. It includes highly parallelized AI for thousands of devices and support for multiple processor cores.

Although this approach is more similar to how a real game works, the dynamic battles can cause the result to vary between different runs, which not least makes it for those who want to make a more in-depth analysis of the performance characteristics.

The system requirements are a quad-core processor, 4 GB of primary memory and a graphics card with at least 1 GB of video memory. In addition, a 64-bit edition of Windows 7 or 8 and 4 GB of free storage space are required. To try out Mantle, you need a graphics card from the Radeon HD 7000 series or later along with the yet to be released driver package Catalyst 14.1.

Star Swarm Benchmark is a free download from Steam.