While you are waiting patiently for AMD to get their Mantle drivers out of the lab and into gamers' hands, you may want to head over to Steam as Oxide Games and Publisher Stardock have released a free demo of their Nitrous Engine there, which supports Mantle.

The demo is called "Star Swarm Benchmark", and is a real-time showcase for what the engine is capable of doing. The demo shows two artificial intelligence controlled fleets of starships battling it out. The developers want you to know that the demo is not a deterministic simulation, and repeated runs may produce varying benchmark results due to the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous Engine.The demo does support the Mantle API, so as soon as you can get your hands on the drivers you will be able to see the performance differences between Mantle and DirectX. The engine is already being used in the development of three game; Stardock's Star Control remake, Mohawk Game's upcoming "Mars", and an unannounced one by Oxide themselves.


You should know that since Stardock has had their hands in the development of this engine from the beginning, you will have to sign-up for a Stardock account when you download it from Steam if you do not already have one.