Ooh, aah, didn't it look pretty when all those little ships buzzed about and blew each other to pieces in the Star Swarm tech demo? Creator Oxide Games has, as promised, now released a downloadable real-time benchmark demo of the Nitrous engine showcase, so all and sundry can force thousands of people to die for their amusement and delight inside their very own computer box.

Star Swarm isn't an actual game, of course, merely a tech demo showing off that the Nitrous engine can display thousands of units at once. So far, Nitrous is confirmed to be used in Stardock's new Star Control, the mysterious game codenamed Mars from Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games, and an unannounced game of Oxide's own.

"We can't wait to see what game developers are able to do when they can count on thousands of units all running individual AI and physics, rather than limiting their designs to a relative handful of objects at a time," co-founder Tim Kipp said in today's announcement.

The demo also supports AMD's new Mantle API, which is due to officially launch in new drivers today. Battlefield 4 has itself just rolled out Mantle support, reporting respectable performance gains.

Star Swarm's available from Steam now. If your PC doesn't have the oomph to run it, here, you can always simply watch the pre-recorded version again: