No ETA On ARK DX12 Update, Says Dev

Last month, we informed you that the highly anticipated ARK DX12 update was about to be released.

That’s what developer Studio Wildcard had enthusiastically announced anyway, but they ultimately had to delay the update because of last minute driver issues, promising that it would be available “next week”.

Hello Survivors,

It’s been a long week here at Studio Wildcard as the programming team has been grinding to get the DX12 version ready for release. It runs, it looks good, but unfortunately we came across some driver issues that we can’t entirely tackle ourselves :(. We’ve reached out to both NVIDIA and AMD and will be working with them to get it resolved as soon as possible! Once that’s tackled, we’ll be needing to do more solid testing across a range of hardware with the new fixes. Sadly, we’re gonna have to delay its release until some day next week in order to be satisfied with it. It’s disappointing to us too and we’re sorry for the delay, really thought we’d have it nailed today but we wouldn’t want to release ARK DX12 without the care it still needs at this point. Hang in there, and when it’s ready for public consumption, it should be worth the wait!

However, a few weeks have since passed and the community quickly noticed that the developers were suddenly reluctant to talk about this. After many requests on the Steam forums, though, ArkDevEngineer delivered a less-than-reassuring reply today.

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 better than the DX11 version. And that is a hard thing to generate an ETA for.

The ARK DX12 update seems far from reaching live servers, at least judging by these words. Studio Wildcard had originally promised a 20% performance boost on average, but now they say that they won’t even release “until it at least runs better than the DX11 version”, which kind of seemed like a given.

Even so, UE4 powered ARK: Survival Evolved remains at the very top of Steam Early Access’ best selling games. The team has been hard at work in terms of content releases, with swamp and tundra biomes now added to the game; flying is now also possible thanks to the Quetzalcoatlus dinosaur, which allows players to safely carry vast amounts of supplies, creatures and survivors.

According to the studio, ARK will also get a meaty expansion shortly after its full release, scheduled in June 2016 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.