Studio Wildcard has confirmed that the DX12 patch for ARK: Survival Evolved has been delayed indefinitely. As the dev team claimed, in its current state the DX12 renderer performs worse than the DX11 one, and the team won’t release any DX12 patch until this API performs better – at least in ARK: Survival Evolved – than its DX11 path.

As Studio Wildcard stated:

“After we found out it was heavily dependent on drivers and the hardware vendors progress we slowed ours a bit. Its 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.”

ARK: Survival Evolved is an Unreal Engine 4 powered game, and some people suggest that the current implementation of DX12 in Epic’s engine is, somehow, still experimental.

On the other hand, rumours suggest that this underwhelming DX12 performance is witnessed on NVIDIA’s hardware and since ARK: Survival Evolved is a “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played Title” (after all, NVIDIA worked closely with Studio Wildcard to implement some NVIDIA GameWorks effects), the team is not releasing a DX12 until NVIDIA has sorted things out.

Now while we understand this decision to delay this DX12 patch, it would be great to gain access to it and see how it performs on AMD’s graphics cards, and whether the performance on those cards is worse than the game’s DX11 version. But that’s never going to happen.