Ahem, so it looks as if the ridiculous rumours of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti are gaining a head of Steam.

Shortly after Ryzen 7’s launch, AMD announced it was partnering with upwards of 300 developers in order to ensure the best possible performance optimisation while using Ryzen chips. Epic scale strategy game Ashes of the Singularity has just been updated with its AMD Ryzen performance patch and the results really are astounding.

For all that we chat about Ashes of the Singularity being the first game to support DirectX 12, beneath all this lurks a promising, if a little chaotic, real-time strategy game. And they, ladies and gents, are few and far between. It also comes with a bit of a twist - potentially thousands of units in a single battle, all moving and shooting independently. That’s a giant leap beyond the likes of Total War, which is essentially 20 units going at it hammer and tongs.

Direct X 12 is supposed to be the next big thing for gaming if Microsoft's marketing team is to be believed. The API has been available for a while but we've yet to see many games running on it – in fact it was only very recently that we have been seeing games officially confirmed to be offering DX12 support in the future.

Ashes of the Singularity, the first ever DirectX 12-capable title, has arrived in Steam Early Access. Oxide Games real-time strategy title is all about large scale warfare, boasting more independently controlled units than just about any other game out there, all with top of the line visuals and impressive unit detail. If total carnage is your thing, this could be the RTS for you.

Ahoy there, it’s driver o’clock. AMD’s been beavering away on a new driver release, which is the second release in just over a month. The previous officially supported driver before this was way back in 2014. AMD recently said it was working on improving driver support and we may be seeing the fruits of their efforts here, with the second driver release in as many months.

Stardock showed they had plenty of smarts when it came to trumpeting DirectX 12. Its large-scale RTS Ashes of the Singularity has surely garnered more coverage than it ever would have, simply because it’s one of the first to support DirectX 12. The asynchronous compute abilities of DX12 means Ashes of the Singularity can handle a frankly insane number of units on-screen at any one time, all acting independently. This is something that can easily cripple CPUs and GPUs running with DirectX 11.

The first DirectX 12 benchmarks are beginning to creep out and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for team green. Ashes of the Singularity is the game in question being benchmarked. The trial version should be available soon, with the full version out later this year. It’s a large-scale strategy game with an immense number of units on-screen at any one time.

We tend to only get new drivers from Nvidia when a big new release is coming out, but the graphics card manufacturer has snuck out a new GeForce driver to tie in with a preview edition of Ashes of the Singularity. The GeForce Game Ready 355.60 drivers are designed specifically to play the demo of Stardock’s new strategy title, but we also get the introduction of GameWorks VR support.

Stardock revealed Ashes of the Singularity during GDC, the new strategy title from Oxide Games its publishing, designed to maximise the capabilities of DirectX 12. If you think back to the unveiling of Mantle you might remember the Star Swarm demo featuring thousands of ships that demonstrated Mantle’s potential for decreasing CPU bottlenecks. Oxide Games is the same team that made this, and Ashes of the Singularity is strategy on a similarly massive scale, delivering thousands of units fighting in multiple armies across the world, all at the same time.