‘ARK: Survival Evolved’ Getting ‘Epic’ Graphics Upgrade For Xbox One X, Play Anywhere Confirmed Again

Studio Wildcard continued to tease an official launch announcement for ARK: Survival Evolved Sunday night. Along the way, co-founder Jesse Rapczack also revealed interesting details about the upgrades the game will receive for the just announced Xbox One X plus confirmed Play Anywhere support between Xbox One and Windows 10 is coming with the launch.

Rapczack appeared as a guest on the YouTube@E3 show with host Geoff Keighly. There he revealed ARK: Survival Evolved will be a day one title for the Xbox One X with a major graphical upgrade over the Xbox One.

Xbox One X ARK: Survival Evolved Upgrades

ARK on the Xbox One X will support the “Epic” graphics setting from the PC version of the open-world survival title. Studio Wildcard is actually bringing over some of the assets and features from the PC edition to Microsoft’s new console. This includes volumetric clouds, higher draw distance settings, and higher resolution textures.

Framerate is also a contentious issue for Studio Wildcard’s dinosaur game and the developers are targeting 60 frames per second. Rapczack does provide the caveat that it will be a variable frame rate because the game world is large and dense with object, creatures, and other players. Additionally, the ability for players to build massive structures can send the framerate into a nosedive as it tries to render all the individual objects that go into the structures.

For those that don’t know, ARK: Survival Evolved currently runs on the Xbox One at 720p for the game world while the user interface is at 1080p. This is after originally releasing at a sub-720p resolution when it first launched on the console before receiving a graphical upgrade in August 2016.

The PlayStation 4 version runs at the same 720p resolution while the PS4 Pro runs at 1080p. It does not sound like the Xbox One X will run at a 4K resolution on the Xbox One X, however. Inquisitr has reached out to Studio Wildcard for confirmation and this article will be updated when it is received.

Sticking with 1080p is not too surprising as the game can choke a high-end PC with a Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card, as YouTube channel Computer Planet discovered last year. It took DudeRandom84 two GTX 1080s in SLI to get the game to run in 4K around 30 frames per second (fps).

The demanding nature of ARK: Survival Evolved is also in part due to the game still needing to go through optimizations. Studio Wildcard plans to focus on those more as the game gets closer to exiting Steam Early Access and the Xbox Game Preview program.

Xbox Play Anywhere

Rapczack also confirmed Play Anywhere is coming to Xbox One and Windows 10 PC with cross-play support between the two platforms. It will also get cross-buy support where buying it on the Xbox One or Xbox One X will grant a free Windows 10 copy and vice versa. Those that have already purchased the game on the console will receive the PC version for free retroactively.

Note that the Steam version of ARK: Survival Evolved is not included in this deal.

So, when will Xbox Play Anywhere arrive? As previously covered, Studio Wildcard plans to add the feature in the 1.0 version. There is no date for this, but Rapczack will appear at on the Twitch E3 broadcast Monday at 3 p.m. ET / 12 p.m. PT with a “big announcement.”

Nothing for PlayStation 4 Pro

It’s important to note that none of the Epic PC level upgrades the Xbox One X is receiving will make their way to the PS4 Pro. Rapczack specifically pointed towards the extra 2 Teraflops of power plus the 12GB of DDR5 RAM in Microsoft’s console as the reason. The extra power makes the extra draw distances and higher resolution textures possible.

[Featured Image by Studio Wildcard]

[Edit: Clarified what the PS4 Pro is not getting.]