A deep dive into the making of the eye-popping Star Swarm demo (interview)

It took a new startup game studio with a big vision to create something that real-time strategy fans will salivate over. At the 2014 International CES tech trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month, the Star Swarm demo from Oxide Games showed 3,000 to 5,000 starships fighting in a massive battle on PCs running on the latest Advanced Micro Devices Kaveri processors.

The demo was all in the name of pushing innovation in 3D graphics for games to new levels in a way that is unconstrained by the limits of today’s platforms. The Hunt Valley, Md.-based game company used its next-generation 64-bit game engine, Nitrous, and AMD’s Mantle application programming interface to create the demo, which will remind you of the huge space battles from the Star Wars: Return of the Jedi movie and the Homeworld game.