Oooh, shinies!

"I came".

I wonder if this generation tech will make it possible to recreate something promised (and, to an extent - presented) for Operation Flashpoint - switching from participant (fighter) role, to unit commander, and then to greater level of command. Or in reverse...

Nitrous should totally develop Star Swarm into a mini-game rather than just a tech demo. It'd be great marketing just to have people download and play it, to let them see what it can do. Like, add basic shield/armor to ships (looks like that is already in) and some buttons to spawn new ships for one side or the other.

So...

Haven't heard much about this since the original demo splash when this post was made.  I didn't realize until today that it was available via steam, so I loaded it up and gave it a try.

On the one hand, it's quite nice.  On the other hand, I'm a bit underwelmed.

So.... I have a latest gen i7 4790k, and a GTX 970, my framerate prob averaged 60, but would bog down to the mid/high teens during the busy periods of the demo skirmish (and would be 120 fps with a more or less empty-ish sky).  With a latest-generation functionally top-of-the-line (no reasonable person is going to have a GTX 980 or above) system.  And in all seriousness, I only splurged on the 970 because I wanted the decreased power consumption on my system (the power efficiency will eventually pay for itself) and a small amount of futureproofing.

So my question is: is this engine still being refined, or is this as efficient as it will get, because it appears that my system wouldn't reasonably play a game using this engine? (worthy of note, this demo had pretty crude ships and projectiles, I'd imagine it would be more resource intensive with textures that would be required in any modern game).

It appears that this demo was largely intended to be a showcase of coding for ATI's Mantle.  But what about the people who do not have ATI cards?  The thing about ATI is that waaaay back in the day they refused to release any video drivers for Linux users, and as such I refuse to buy any of their products to this day, as I was a pretty avid Linux user then (and am still a huge Linux proponent, but use win8 out of convenience).  As such, I'm planning to continue to not buy ATI products in the future. 

Will this engine be reasonable useful on Nvidia cards?

cheers,

-tid242

You will need DirectX 12 or Mantle to get much out of the demo.   

Your Nvidia card will make use of DirectX 12.  But DirectX 11 is kind of crappy.

Oh, that's good to know, that is helpful...

Also: you might be interested to know that the Oxide forums really need to be cleaned up.  I hopped over there after posting the above and they were all filled with spam, much of it apparently Russian.  Pharmaceuticals, dating sites, and hopefully porn - although I didn't have time to click on all of the links, though I wanted to - there were just so many...

cheers,

-tid242

tid242 - Thanks for the heads up!