Ark: Survival Evolved was set to be one of the first popular titles to support DirectX 12 this year following the release of Windows 10 back in July. The highly anticipated DirectX 12 update was originally set to release back in August, before being delayed in order to wait for drivers to mature. Now, it looks like players will be kept waiting even longer, as Studio Wildcard no longer has an ETA for the update launch.
To be fair, Ark is still in early access so development on the game is still continuing. Right now, the studio has a DX12 version of the game running but it doesn't want to roll the update out until drivers have developed to a point where performance will supersede the DirectX 11 version of the game.
In a new statement over on the game's Steam forum, one of the Ark developers said: “After we found out it was heavily dependent on drivers and the hardware vendors progress we slowed ours a bit. It's still being worked on, but we have no plans on releasing it until it at least runs betters than the DX11 version. And that is a hard thing to generate an ETA for.”
So if you happen to be playing Ark, and you're wondering what's taking the DirectX 12 update so long, you can blame driver support.
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KitGuru Says: People are very excited for Ark's DirectX 12 update. The game just sold two million copies and the player base is strong but the game doesn't run all that well. This DX12 update could help out with that but unfortunately, things keep getting pushed back.
Now as far as I know, DX12 requires devs to be more adept at optimizing rather than having optimization through drivers, so I’m not really sure I believe that statement. But dev words are essentially “word of god” so unless you know 100% if it’s crap or not, you can’t really call out how their studio runs.
Agree. Their statement seems contrary to what everyone has been saying about drivers being less critical to performance. I have no idea how the game is a best seller. I bought it and got a refund as I was getting 10FPS on the absolute lowest settings @ 1080 running a i73770K, GTX780, 16GB RAM, off an SSD.
They are a Nvidia “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played Game” … and the patch would only help AMD Radeon cards like in all other DX12 benchmarks/games so far. So Nvidia is basically not doing anything regarding their driver and so blocking the DX12 patch.
They are lazy. They have to rewrite the game for dx12 you can’t just patch it.
I agree vw showed us the lies the profit hungry corporates get up to.
That must be why the 980 ti outperforms the Fury X in Fable then. Right.
Less of the conspiracy AMD fanboy. The fanboy-likes have all crawled from under the woodwork lately. Meanwhile, sensible folk who don’t have salivating loyalty to any particular brand see things much more rationally– instead of jumping up and down in victory over one benchmark.
Nice try. But I didn’t say anything about “outperforming”. I said that Radeons profit more from DX12 than Geforce cards. In every single benchmark so far. I don’t care which card is faster. But since AMD has more to gain from DX12 than Nvidia, Nvidia isn’t in a hurry to provide special DX12 drivers for ARK. That’s all. Sorry, Nvidia fanboy.