Oxide Games has released a new update for its stress test program, Star Swarm, that significantly improves performance under AMD’s latest API, Mantle. According to the team, the previous build lacked proper multi-threading functionalities when using Mantle.
As Oxide’s Adam Biessener wrote on the company’s blog:
“Did we crack some secret code or find a crazy new optimization? No, nothing so spectacular. The truth is that we made a mistake in our haste to deploy the build that stripped out the activation process. We didn’t follow our normal release process, and missed how a minor change in that build had disabled some of the Nitrous engine’s multi-threading features when using Mantle. Unfortunately we didn’t notice that at first, as nobody was running Mantle last week due to the beta driver being delayed.”
Those interested in getting a glimpse of what this new API can do can go ahead and download the stress test from Steam.

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’ll be keeping my eye on Mantle and perhaps it’s adoption by devs will kick certain companies into gear or force their hand to do something,
Naah you just hold on to that nvidia card mate same as me and be happy for what it is 😉
But hey Mantle are looking nice but for the sake of it let this crap die allready, pc DONT need any more API so f*ck this and go OpenGL all the way and we know nvidia allways playing nice with OpenGL!
I’m not going to sell it for an AMD card like I said because of the Linux driver support and my next bit of hardware will be an i5, per core performance is too poor to go with the cheaper AMD FX CPU and there is only £40 difference anyway.
Yeah seems like the smart thing to do mate, I have this i52500k myself and it’s kickin a*s @4.5Ghz so I am more then happy 🙂
If I were you, I’d honestly go the FX 8320 or 8350 simply because it’s built for the future. Sure an i5 beats it now but when games start using 8 cores heavily, there will be a difference.
Not really, the piledriver is still poor in performance terms against the i5/i3 and by the time AMD fix it, the piledriver will be out of date anyway. It’s no good if you get worse performance until a game you like with Mantle comes out, assuming you have the GPU to back it up.
I wouldn’t really call it poor in performance. The 8350 matches i5’s, hell even i7’s in games such as Crysis 3 and BF4. But I will agree that by the time 8 cores are fully utilized, there will be way better cpu’s out there from both Intel and AMD.
To be honest, its actually about time someone kicked Microsoft’s butt and take away the power that they hold in the industry! I don’t know if you’ve heard panel discussions of top PC developers, they all say DirectX eventhough so widely used is very clunky to implement. There is a huge waste of resources as compared to say OpenGL…so what I wish for in the future is more developers ditch DirectX and implement OpenGL and perhaps Mantle and support Linux, so we can all tell Microsoft to f** off!
Sure is about bloody time, so heres hoping and by the looks of it with the impact I think SteamOS will have the future are looking bright 🙂
Significantly? Any particular numbers?