Stardock has released the first public beta of Ashes of the Singularity. This new real-time strategy game, which features the first ever native DirectX 12 support, aims to deliver planetary warfare on a scale never seen before in gaming.
Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock, said:
“In Ashes of the Singularity, gamers aren’t fighting a battle, they’re fighting a war. Players command thousands of units across a vast battlefield while building up their economic and technological might.”
The public beta for Ashes of the Singularity allows players to command their forces in a war that has spread across much of the galaxy in the 23rd century. Players have a choice of playing either the descendants of humanity, the Post-Human Coalition, or their bitter enemy, the Substrate.
Brad Wardell added:
“Over the past few months we’ve worked closely with AMD and Nvidia to fully leverage their hardware. Our alpha testers have reported substantial performance gains, which is allowing us to begin lowering the hardware requirements.”
Ashes of the Singularity has some notable features, including:
- The first native DirectX 12 game allowing each CPU core to command the player’s GPU simultaneously, which allows for more rendered units to be displayed on screen at the same time – by an order of magnitude – than in any previous RTS game to date.
- A multi-core, real-time strategy AI that allows for excellent single player RTS gaming.
- A new native 64-bit 3D engine called Nitrous that makes full use of the features of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, allowing for thousands of light sources on screen simultaneously.
- A new type of unit group organization known as a “meta” unit that makes it easy for players to manage potentially tens of thousands of units across a world.
- Advanced Nitrous 3D engine allows players to zoom out on the map without having to transform the map into a simplified view of the battlefield.
Brad Wardell concluded:
“Our goal with Ashes of the Singularity is to help introduce a new generation of gamers to real-time strategy games. We want to make a game where players can invite their friends in and be up and playing relatively quickly without a lengthy explanation about how to play.”
Those interested can read Matt’s opinion about Ashes of the Singularity here.
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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For this “public” beta, you still need to buy it or you can test it freely?
Not sure about this game. Looks too much like Supreme Commander and that was a dry biscuit of a game.
I tried the first pre-Beta build (0.6), and aside from the scale and some cool things, I found some issues with the AI, like sometimes instead of attack they do nothing and let the enemy do whatever they want. Like the enemy AI is smarter than yours and that is a massive problem. (not sure if they solved that by now)
Also sometimes the “path” mechanic don’t work properly or there are areas to select close to those generators and if you want to move units you can’t put them exactly where you want.
Graphically speaking is not impressive either, I still think Supreme Commander is more epic when it comes to an actual battle. The way the AI moves and interact with each other is amazing, some of the effects and physic are great too.
Now for the technical side (remember I tried that early build) CPU usage (FX8350 @4.2Ghz, 8GB RAM 1866mhz) stayed at 45/50% all the time even with thousands of units doing their thing, and the frame rates with everything maxed without VSync were a mix bag. I have drops to 20FPS at some points while going up to see more of the map, close up shots to see the battle it goes up to 50/60’s FPS, and probably the average is more or less around 40FPS with an Asus Strix GTX970 4GB OC.
Hope they improve the game even more, is not bad at all but the size of it and all those multiple fronts at once makes it a little bit difficult to manage some situations. I felt that I need more hands or monitors to control each front at once so the enemy AI won’t screw me over.
Planetary Annihilation has a nice “dual” view with a secondary camera in where you can control different things at once also in different planets…that is what this game also needs.