Ashes of the Singularity
| Ashes of the Singularity | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | |
| Publisher(s) | Stardock Entertainment |
| Composer(s) |
Geoff Knorr Michael Curran Richard Gibbs |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) | March 31, 2016 |
| Genre(s) | Real-time strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| Metacritic | 69/100 |
Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy video game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The game was released for Microsoft Windows on March 31, 2016.
On November 10, 2016 Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation was released. It is a standalone expansion that adds to the base game with more units, maps, and structures, as well as several interface tweaks. The total player count was also increased from 8 to 16 players. The expansion was later merged into the base game on February 16, 2017 after it became apparent that the separate games divided the player community.
Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy video game. Its main distinction is its ability to handle thousands of individual units engaging in combat simultaneously, far greater than most other games of its kind, across large maps and without abstraction. This is achieved through a newly-developed engine called Nitrous designed to fully leverage modern 64-bit multi-core processors, reflected in the relatively high system requirements (which include a quad-core processor). To allow players to effectively control such large numbers of units, groups of individual units can be combined into "meta-units" which operate in a cohesive manner, upon which complex strategies can be developed.
Ashes of the Singularity was the first video game released with DirectX 12 support. It is also one of the first to support Vulkan. An in-development version of the game was released commercially via Steam Early Access on October 22, 2015. The full version of the game was released Windows on March 31, 2016.
Because of the game's early DirectX 12 support and extensive use of parallel computation, it is commonly used as a benchmark. Controversy erupted when Nvidia GPUs were found to perform poorly relative to their AMD counterparts on early beta versions of Ashes; this was due to the game's use of asynchronous compute and shading features which are implemented in hardware on AMD Graphics Core Next GPUs but had to be performed in software on Nvidia GPUs.
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