Space games are everywhere. The industry goes through waves of genre- or setting-specific infatuation, and this era of gaming seems to be obsessive about space sims and spaceship battles. The looming monolith is Star Citizen, as we all know, but there's also the recently-released Elite: Dangerous, indie newcomers Rebel Galaxy and Voidspace, and non-sim games like Dreadnought.

Space sims are notoriously learning- and time-intensive, making them somewhat inaccessible to gamers who seek nothing more than space-flight combat and the obliteration of massive capital ships. That's where games like Dreadnought come into play, developed by Yager and housed under Greybox alongside Grey Goo.

Day one, year one of PAX South concluded with an off-site event hosted by the Cloud Imperium Games team, headed-up by CEO and Star Citizen lead Chris Roberts.

Elite: Dangerous is one of the best-optimized games we've tested this year, right up there with GRID: Autosport. The game is a member of the impending cluster of space sim and space-flight combat games actively being developed. Like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous comes from the designers of a game that's decades-old, 1984's “Elite.”

With Elite: Dangerous' official launch, we've put the game on our GPU bench to test the FPS on various graphics card configurations, including an R7 250X, 270X, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 980, and more. In addition to our usual video settings tests, we ran Elite: Dangerous using AMD's VSR and nVidia's DSR (super resolution) to render output at 4K. These tests are representative of performance yield on a true 4K display. Our crash fix guide may be useful to those who are experiencing issues running Elite: Dangerous.

The world of space simulators has experienced major throwbacks to the 80s and 90s lately, with the return of Chris Roberts (Star Citizen, Wing Commander, Freelancer) and David Braben (Elite) to the scene. Elite: Dangerous just went gold and started shipping in a finalized state earlier this week.

As with most modern games, Elite: Dangerous players are experiencing crashes to desktop, black screens, tearing, stuttering, server authentication issues, and FPS drops. We've got a few solutions in this guide.