Ashes of the Singularity

Publisher: Stardock

This is effectively the game that introduced the world to DirectX 12, with it offering one of the very first easily repeatable benchmarks. It's a real-time strategy game that features large scale battles with hundreds of units and individual ballistic calculations for every shot. In short, there's a lot going on, and the game is developed specifically to exploit DirectX 12 capabilities like large draw call counts and asynchronous compute (scheduling and executing multiple queues all at once). The game even supports the API's Explicit Multi-Adapter feature, allowing AMD and Nvidia cards to be paired up multi-GPU rendering scenario.


Using the DirectX 12 version, we run the game's built-in benchmark using the 'High' preset, as we've found settings above this to be too extreme. We record the first 30 seconds of the benchmark, as this includes the most challenging part and is representative of the whole thing.