Is Star Swarm Stress Test free?

Yes — Star Swarm Stress Test is free to play, so you can install and play it without buying anything.

Can I play Star Swarm Stress Test on Mac?

Not natively — Steam lists no macOS version of Star Swarm Stress Test. Mac players would need a cloud gaming service or a Windows compatibility layer.

Is Star Swarm Stress Test multiplayer?

No — Steam lists Star Swarm Stress Test as single-player only.

Is Star Swarm Stress Test on PC Game Pass?

No — Star Swarm Stress Test is not on PC Game Pass right now.

Star Swarm Stress Test

Oxide Games · January 30, 2014 · Utilities, Benchmark, Free to Play

Star Swarm Stress Test is free to play — no purchase needed. We track it so you know if that ever changes.

Very Positive91% · 339

Best price

Free

Get it free on Steam

This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →

Screenshots

Star Swarm Stress Test price

Star Swarm Stress Test is free to play — there is no purchase price, on Steam or anywhere else we track. We keep watching it, so if it ever stops being free the price history on this page will show when that happened and what it changed to.

About Star Swarm Stress Test

✦ AI summary

Watch thousands of individual ships engage in massive real-time space battles with full physics, AI, and pathfinding all happening simultaneously with no loading screens or off-screen trickery. This free tech demo showcases Oxide Games' Nitrous engine and its revolutionary SWARM technology that leverages multi-core processors to deliver film-quality rendering at an unprecedented scale.

Welcome to the newest frontier in gaming: battles and scenes at the scale of armies and fleets, all active at once with no trickery around loading screens or off-screen abstractions.

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. Originally conceived as an internal stress test, Oxide decided to release Star Swarm so that the public can share our vision of what we think the future of gaming can be. The simulation in Star Swarm shows off Nitrous’ ability to have thousands of individual units onscreen at once, each running their own physics, AI, pathfinding, and threat assessments.

Nitrous uses the power of its proprietary SWARM (Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model) technology to achieve incredible performance on modern, multi-core computer hardware. SWARM allows Nitrous to do things previously thought impossible in real-time 3D rendering, like Object Space Lighting -- the same techniques used in the film industry -- and having thousands of unique individual units onscreen at once.

Note that Star Swarm is not a deterministic simulation -- the AI and everything else is being computed in real time, so you will get slightly different results from multiple executions even on the same hardware. Unfortunately, achieving 100% determinism with the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous engine is an unrealistic goal.

The Nitrous engine is already in use for two games currently in production: an unannounced title from Oxide Games and Stardock’s Star Control reboot. Nitrous is also available for licensing to interested game developers.

You’ve got to see it to believe it. Download Star Swarm for free now to see what your gaming PC can do with the next-generation Nitrous engine.

Key Features

Up to 10,000+ units onscreen at once – Imagine what kind of games can be made when developers can count on simulating battles and scenes at this scale
SWARM technology blows the performance curve – Fully utilizing each hardware CPU or GPU core available, SWARM allows Nitrous to achieve incredible results
Benchmark mode generates performance information – Since Star Swarm is a dynamic simulation rather than a canned demo, run it several times to see what Nitrous’ real-world gaming performance is on your machine
Film-style rendering – Nitrous uses Object Space Lighting, the same techniques used in film, including real-time film-quality motion blur

Star Swarm Stress Test — game info

Platforms: Windows
Player modes: Single-player
PC Game Pass: Not included

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

Recommended Sep 25, 2026

== Hardware Configuration ================================= GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 CPU: AuthenticAMD AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor Physical Cores: 8 Logical Cores: 8 Physical Memory: 33157967872 Allocatable Memory: 140737488224256 =========================================================== == Configuration ========================================== API: DirectX Scenario: ScenarioFollow.csv User Input: Disabled Resolution: 1920x1080 Fullscreen: True GameCore Update: 16.6 ms Bloom Quality: High PointLight Quality: High ToneCurve Quality: High Glare Overdraw: 16 Shading Samples: 64 Shade Quality: Mid Deferred Contexts (D3D11): Disabled Small Batch Optimized (Mantle): Enabled Temporal AA Duration: 16 Temporal AA Time Slice: 2 Detailed Frame Info: Off =========================================================== == Results ================================================ Test Duration: 360 Seconds Total Frames: 92931 Average FPS: 258.14 Average Unit Count: 5148 Maximum Unit Count: 6397 Average Batches/MS: 3231.28 Maximum Batches/MS: 10709.37 Average Batch Count: 14875 Maximum Batch Count: 113804 ===============…

Recommended Jun 16, 2026

=========================================================== Oxide Games Star Swarm Stress Test - ©2013 Version 1.10 06/16/2026 02:14 =========================================================== == Hardware Configuration ================================= GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti CPU: GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 265 Physical Cores: 20 Logical Cores: 20 Physical Memory: 33693753344 Allocatable Memory: 140737488224256 =========================================================== == Configuration ========================================== API: DirectX Scenario: ScenarioFollow.csv User Input: Disabled Resolution: 1920x1080 Fullscreen: True GameCore Update: 16.6 ms Bloom Quality: High PointLight Quality: High ToneCurve Quality: High Glare Overdraw: 16 Shading Samples: 64 Shade Quality: Mid Deferred Contexts (D3D11): Disabled Small Batch Optimized (Mantle): Enabled Temporal AA Duration: 16 Temporal AA Time Slice: 2 Detailed Frame Info: Off =========================================================== == Results ================================================ Test Duration: 360 Seconds Total Frames…

Recommended Mar 26, 2026

Handy CPU stress test tool.

Recommended Jan 17, 2026

it works

Recommended Aug 30, 2025

It's Alright

Recommended Jul 25, 2025

Nice stress test especially for PCs that may have frame-rate problem :)

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