In October 2013, a number of the Civilization V team members broke away to form their own company. Oxide Games was born, with its first announced task the creation of the strategy-focused Nitrous Engine.

At AMD's Developer Summit in December, Oxide showed off the first footage of the Nitrous internal engine demo with a space battle of epic proportions in something called StarSwarm. The demonstration is recorded footage of two AI opponents working with art assets only a few months old.

The footage embedded below is the entirety of the presentation, but jumping ahead to 26 minutes will give you a look at the engine in action. The demo indicates that AMD's Mantle technology will further boost Nitrous' potential by enhancing the performance of even mid-range CPUs.

The demo includes about 50,000 batches on screen at once, which represents about 3,000 units (each getting multiple render passes). Each of the ships has a unique firing solution and the movement is coordinated within squadrons and squadron groups. One carrier even has 200 independently firing missle turrets.

The framerate is reportedly 350-400 frames per second, though the specs of the machine running the demo aren't detailed. Later in the presentation, there are two examples offered demonstrating current performance a 4 core (8 thread) CPU and a 6 core (12 thread) CPU. Again, this is with unoptimized GPU performance.

Oxide's goal first goal is 100,000 batches and claims that by 2015, 300,000 batches will be possible. By 2018, the goal is 1 million. The public will get its hands on the Nitrous Engine in early 2014.

For more, check out a recent interview with Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson, who is building a game in the Nitrous Engine with his new company, Mohawk Games. The interview also offers some explanation of how Stardock is approaching its development across partners with Nitrous.

Our Take

If you got lost in the technical aspects (and no one would blame you), just watch the video from the 26 minute mark. Seeing is believing, and I'm very excited to play games built on Nitrous.