Star Swarm Stress Test
Oxide Games · 2014 · Utilities, Benchmark, Free to Play
PC
5 user reviews100% · 5 📉 Recent reviews down 90%
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →
Screenshots
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.
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
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
The swarm was so impressive, I stared at it for 10 minutes, mostly because my PC froze and I couldn’t exit.2 found this helpful
=========================================================== 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…
Handy CPU stress test tool.
it works
It's Alright
Nice stress test especially for PCs that may have frame-rate problem :)
Community reviews
—
0 reviews
Sign in to write a review.
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this game.
