Lost Ark will get a straight efficiency enhance with DirectX 11, stunning nobody

Frankly I really feel a bit odd writing a publish that quantities to “14-year-old rendering tech works better than 20-year-old rendering tech”, however Lost Ark – 2022’s largest shock hit up to now – has solely not too long ago come round to the advantages of DirectX 11. While it’s the default rendering possibility within the western model that launched final week, the unique South Korean model went years with simply DirectX 9 to its identify, and the press construct that I used for efficiency testing (and Ed is utilizing for his review-in progress) stays locked to DX9. Despite the truth that, as I’ve confirmed from testing the discharge construct as properly, DX11 gives a tidy efficiency achieve over its predecessor.

DX11 doesn’t make Lost Ark look higher in some other means, however a body charge enhance is a body charge enhance. Back on the DX9-only evaluate construct, equipping my check PC with a humble GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and operating the Very High preset at 1080p produced a 73fps common, however on the general public DX11 model this jumped to 87fps. That’s an additional 19% FPS, without spending a dime.

Switching to my really useful settings of Very High with Indirect Shadows, Distortion Effect and Motion Blur all switched off, Lost Ark might additionally pump out an 114fps common on DX11. Using the identical settings on DX9 acquired me 95fps, so once more DX11 is a direct improve with no drawbacks. No surprise the Lost Ark Twitter account merely tweeting “DX11” earlier this month was sufficient to get some individuals excited.

DX11

— Lost Ark (@playlostark) February 4, 2022

While I’m not tremendous jazzed that the pre-release model was caught with DX9 – DX11 being simply as absent as the feminine Deadeye’s trousers, and for no extra obvious reasoning – I’m, because the schmuck that spent a number of hours benchmarking it, glad to see that the efficiency features of decreasing particular person settings stay proportional within the transfer from DirectX 9 to 11. In different phrases, utilizing these really useful settings in DX9 produced 30% higher efficiency than the Very High preset as-is, whereas on DirectX 11 they sped issues up by 31%. So Lost Ark gamers get extra frames, and my settings information isn’t rendered utterly ineffective. That’s a win-win, although it sadly gained’t assist with the prolonged server queue instances and reported lacking characters that Lost Ark has been grappling with since its delayed launch.