Ashes of the Singularity II will have a GPU benchmark
Ashes of the Singularity II has a free demo on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest. The demo is available through March 2, 2026, and Steam Next Fest itself runs from February 23 to March 2, 2026.
Stardock and Oxide Games say the demo is built around large-scale RTS battles where decision-making matters more than high actions-per-minute play. It is described as an RTS for players who “want to think like a general,” with the demo positioned as a first look ahead of the full release planned for later this year.
The demo includes two playable factions, the United Earth Forces and the Post-Human Coalition. It also supports skirmish matches against AI and multiplayer for up to eight players, with AI backfill, across three maps that scale from 24 players up to 28 players.
The original Ashes of the Singularity was one of the early, widely used DirectX 12 benchmarks, and it became a common way to compare CPUs and GPUs under a DX12 workload. It was also the first DX12 game to launch publicly.
Source: Oxide Games
Ashes of the Singularity: popular DX12 benchmark and source of many leaks
Oxide and Stardock also ran public benchmark and leaderboard pages for Ashes, which turned into a long-running source of pre-release hardware sightings. Over the years, entries spotted in the Ashes database have been used to surface unreleased GPUs and CPUs ahead of announcements, sometimes with results quickly removed after they were noticed.
After checking the demo, I’m pleased to report that the new game will also have a benchmark. However, whether the data will be available for everyone is yet to be revealed.
The Ashes of the Singularity II demo is available now on Steam. If Oxide ships a comparable benchmark pipeline for the sequel, it could end up back on the radar for both performance testing and early hardware breadcrumbs.
Source: Steam
