ARK: Survival Evolved DirectX 12 Patch Coming Friday

ARK: Survival Evolved is a visually stunning survival-adventure game and already amassed a huge community. As with any graphical masterpiece, the GPU demands are quite high especially at UHD and QHD resolutions. The developer, Studio Wildcard, has announced a huge update via the Steam Community which releases this Friday. Included is a DirectX 12 patch which promises performance gains of 20% compared to the DirectX 11 rendering. However, it will be interesting if this is an average figure and how it scales across various GPUs. Will the DirectX 12 functionality work better on lower-end cards or AMD GPUs going by previous results?

Below is the complete patch notes for Friday’s update:

“– Specific Representative “on-ground” meshes for all dropped items
– Water Raft
– Driveable Dune Buggy Modding example (we’ll let modders have the first crack at vehicles with this example
– Human and Dino Warpaint

– Collidable Saddle Platform & Build-on-Saddles: make your big brontos and plesios into mobile bases, build just about anything up from them! Build ladders to climb up onto them, whatever — the possibilities are nearly endless!!! We originally were gonna limit it to sleeping bags and turrets, but let’s just go all-out and make it work with everything.

– Powered Elevator Structures
– Controllable Ballistas/Turrets to place on structures and on the backs of your dinos
– Swamp Biome & New Swamp Cave
– Snow Biome & New Snow Cave
– Random GPU Driver crash fix: TrueSky”

In addition to technical improvements, there will also be a new creature called the Doedicurus. To accompany this announcement, the ARK team has unveiled a trailer and explanation of the animal’s abilities.

“The Armadillo-like Doedicurus is a handy creature to have in your stables, as it can efficiently harvest stone on an industrial scale. It also has tremendous defensive protection via its hard shell, to which it will retreat if threatened. Most importantly, when riding it, you can enter “shell-charge” mode and roll through the ARK as a hardened, nearly indestructible ball… similar to a certain blue rodent! This ability is great for rapidly closing the distance towards enemies, or just plowing through them like a bowling ball, making the Doedicurus fun for the whole tribe.”

With DirectX 12 powered games finally becoming mainstream, there’s no better time to get into PC Gaming the reap the rewards of a truly optimized API.

Thank you WCCFTech for providing us with this information.