ARK dev: Xbox One X horsepower is 'phenomenal'

ARK: Survival Evolved is another super-hot game on the PC right now, but it has been enjoying some love on both the Xbox One and PS4 over the last few months, and now that the new Xbox One X is out the developer has some words to say.

Studio Wildcard's Jesse Rapczak was recently on the E3 2017 Live Show with Geoff Keighley, where he said that they're aiming for 60FPS on Xbox One X, and that 60FPS was "not possible" on the PS4 Pro. PS4 Pro users can run 60FPS, but only at 720p where we'll see ARK running at 1080p 60FPS on close to Epic settings on Xbox One X. During the interview, Rapczak said: "It's amazing. It's basically like Epic settings on PC, we're targeting 60FPS. We recently introduced variable frame rate, but on Xbox One X with the extra horsepower, you'll notice less variation in your frame rate even in busy situations".

Rapczak added: ":The PS4 Pro also has improved frame rate when compared to PS4. Before the XB1X, it was the best console version of ARK, but it's hard to argue with that 6 teraflops [laughs]. Having the same frame rate in our game isn't really possible, there are a couple reasons for that: the XB1X not only has a faster CPU than PS4 Pro, it also has a lot more RAM. I'd say there's a 50% performance difference".

When it comes to the Xbox One X, his comments build hype: "The Xbox One X is great. Everything from the devkits is so much easier to develop for. It's faster in all sorts of ways, especially for us developers it's easier to iterate. In terms of horsepower, it's just phenomenal, it is expensive but when you think about the price for a similarly specced PC, it doesn't unreasonable at all to me. Overall, the quality is going up a lot. It would have been easy to say, hey, let's just take the Xbox One version and crank up the resolution, but actually we've brought over some enhanced effects from PC. We've actually got volumetric lighting and clouds on Xbox One X, higher draw distance that is equal to PC's Epic settings, higher resolution textures...".

There was one big thing that happened for ARK: Windows 10 and Xbox One versions will have cross play, and cross play - even retroactive cross buy, which is amazing. Only thing is that the cross buy/play options won't work with the Steam version of the game, which is nasty.

Had to end it on a bad note, didn't you Studio Wildcard.