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Next-gen strategy game engine lets you control an army of 5,000 units at one time
Every real-time strategy game has some kind of population cap, limiting the number of units that can be placed simultaneously on a player's terrain. This limit can stem from the designers' need to balance competition between armies, but ultimately it'll also have something to do with the underlying hardware in a PC or console, because a processor will slow down if it's asked to simulate too many independent, physical 3D objects at once. Some RTS games set the limit at 50-70 units, while others can cope with as many as 500, but a new game engine called Nitrous takes things up a level: It uses AMD's Mantle programming tool to speed up communication between the CPU and GPU, allowing up to 5,000 AI- or physics-driven objects (i.e., not mindless clones or animations) to be displayed onscreen at one time. Coming up, we've got a 1080p video of Star Swarm, a demo simulation that shows off what Nitrous can do, plus an explanation of how Oxide Games, the company behind Star Swarm, made this possible.
