Star Control: Origins launched over a year ago on PC. When he reviewed the game, Nathan praised the game's writing but also noted how the combat lacked depth.

　　Star Control: Origins boasts some of the sharpest writing I’ve come across in a while. It made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions, which is a rare thing. Unfortunately, this space adventure is at its worst when it’s at its spaciest. A lack of navigational tools, dull resource collecting, and oversimplified space battles all conspire to knock the game down a peg. Star Control: Origins serves up a lively galaxy worth exploring, but sometimes the commute can be a killer.

　　Now, seemingly out of left field, developer Stardock released a benchmark that focuses on measuring DirectX 12 and Vulkan performance on your PC. According to the press release, the goal here is not only to allow gamers to evaluate their configurations (and compared their results online) but primarily to help AMD and NVIDIA in 'assessing strengths and weaknesses of their DirectX 12 and Vulkan drivers', which are often still beaten by the older DirectX 11 API.

　　Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said:

　　Being able to have several threads talking to the GPU at once is a game changer. When fully exploited by the game and graphics drivers, and then combined with hardware with lots of cores, a lot of exciting game features become possible.

　　The biggest technical challenge was making sure to push the CPU and GPU simultaneously. The planet in the benchmark is being done a bit like the Genesis demo from Star Trek II. That is, the planet is actually being generated as the lander travels over it. This is extremely CPU intensive and really lets users see the connection between lots of CPU cores and next-generation APIs.

　　The Star Control: Origins benchmark also supports AMD's FidelityFX technology for GPU accelerated sharpening. Brad Wardell added:

　　When we saw what FidelityFX could do in a scene, we were a little skeptical that this kind of visual improvement was 'free,' so naturally we added this as an option for the benchmark. Sure enough, it appears to have no performance impact while delivering noticeable improvements to visual clarity.

　　Lastly, the benchmark even features the option to push the CPU hard by placing 'hundreds of objects' in the way of the lander ship, to demonstrate the capabilities of multicore processors in physics intensive games.

　　Let us know your benchmark results in the comments below!