Humanity long ago shed its mortal skin and developed into beings of pure consciousness. But the Singularity is a thing of the past and the very future of human existence is being threatened. Though the post-humans wield godlike power, they find themselves at war for domination of not just the Milky Way but all galaxies with Haalee, the sentient AI, who is bent on saving the universe from post-human predation.

Pouring your human consciousness into thousands of deadly constructs, the time has come for you to join epic confrontations where countless robotic manifestations of war smash each other into scrap only to be replaced as factories convert all available matter into a steady stream of fresh war machines. In this war for ever-more intelligence, where control of matter to fuel the expansion of computing power is the only goal, the struggle will inevitably consume the galaxy...one planet at a time.

Beta 2 includes a new DirectX 12 benchmark developed by Oxide Games as well as explicit support for new DirectX 12 features such as multiple GPUs and Asynchronous compute.

“With this update, players can improve game performance by adding another video card,” said Dan Baker, Chief Scientist at Oxide Games. “As long as the two cards are reasonably similar in performance, they can be of any model or brand including mixing AMD and NVidia cards together. Players just insert the additional video card and enable it via the game’s video options panel.”

The new benchmark is accessible by users from the main menu with different display preferences available from the options menu.

“Stardock and Oxide are doing great work taking advantage of Windows 10 with DirectX 12 features such as asynchronous compute and multiple GPUs,” said Kevin Unangst, Senior Global Director, PC Gaming at Microsoft. “Their new DirectX 12 benchmark lets gamers see how their systems perform with actual gameplay.”

In addition, Beta 2 also greatly improves on the already well received artificial intelligence (AI) first scene in Beta 1.

“Ashes of the Singularity isn’t just a battle, it’s a war across an entire world,” said Brad Wardell, Executive Producer of Ashes of the Singularity. “As visually stunning as the game can be, the success of the game is dependent on the gameplay. That’s why we’re investing so much into making sure the computer opponents are such worthy adversaries.”

Beta 2 is now available in Early Access on both Steam and GOG. It includes single player skirmish, co-op multiplayer, and ranked multiplayer.

A real-time strategy game on a scale never before seen, where even the smallest units have diverse, independent weapons systems on them and every shot fired has its own targeting solution and ballistics model, Ashes of the Singularity explores entirely new and engaging gameplay fundamentals coupled with jaw-dropping visuals. With literally thousands of units acting independently on screen at the same time, players are introduced to a familiar infrastructure of real-time strategy gameplay while focusing their attention not on small engagements between a handful of units, but instead waging large-scale wars across multiple simultaneous battlefronts.

Ashes of the Singularity offers innovative multiplayer alongside its epic single-player campaign that tells the tale of the Singularity and complications arising from humanity's evolution away from physical form. League structures, leaderboards, stats and other features will be announced as development continues, powered by Stardock's cloud-based Project Tachyon metagaming services (led by lead architect Adrian Luff, who helped build Blizzard's Battle.net).

Key Features:

• 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.