We just deployed a 
new build of our Star Swarm stress test  that significantly improves the demo’s performance using AMD’s Mantle  API. We suggest that 
those of you interested in benchmarking and  performance numbers re-run your Mantle scenarios; you may be surprised  at the results.
 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.
 It’s all fixed now, so Mantle users should see a noticeable boost in  performance on most configurations (this fix doesn’t have a huge effect  on powerful-CPU/slow-GPU systems). We’ve also addressed the “gray  screen” issue that was affecting some non-English Windows systems.
 We appreciate everyone’s patience and feedback as we hunt down some  of these hard-to-reach bugs for this alpha test of the Nitrous Engine.