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Oxide Games Shows Off Its New 64-bit Cross Platform 3D Engine - Screens

by Rainier on Jan. 13, 2014 @ 3:21 p.m. PST

Oxide Games is a new indie studio comprised of engineering talent from companies such as Firaxis and Microsoft who are are dedicated to making the definitive 3D engine for next-generation strategy games for console and PC.

The engine, Nitrous, is a native 64-bit multicore game engine designed specifically for the hardware now common in PCs as well as the PS4 and Xbox One.

What makes Nitrous unique is its support for Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model (SWARM). Specifically, the engine renders calls automatically from whatever CPU core is most available.  This allows for a vastly larger number of high-fidelity 3D objects to be rendered to the screen at the same time.

In addition, with its unprecedented utilization of multiple cores, Nitrous is able to realize the potential of new architectures such as Intel’s Haswell CPU.

The shots come courtesy of Star Swarm, an engine demo showing off Oxide’s proprietary Nitrous Engine. With two configurable AI sides running real unit AI and physics in real time, Nitrous is capable of simulating and rendering large-scale, complex scenes never before seen in games.


By natively supporting 64-bit computing, Nitrous is able to support very high resolution texture models while its multicore capability enable vast numbers of light sources on screen simultaneously.

A number of developers have already committed to using Nitrous for upcoming titles.  Developer and publisher Stardock Entertainment, known for PC games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations and Fallen Enchantress, provided the seed capital for Oxide Games as part of the Stardock Strategic Investment Fund.

Oxide Games is based in Timonium, Maryland.

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