[GameGPU] ARK: Survival Evolved, GameWorks

[PrincessFrosty]

Yes, it is. If a dev puts a game out on Steam, Valve should perform a type of validation. The story of Journey of Light makes Valve look like idiots because they essentially participated in false advertisement. Read the whole page description for the game. Valve yanked sales for a reason. It's because they are the gatekeepers of their domain.

They yanked it for good reasons, it doesn't mean that valve are responsible for the quality of games sold through their service, the advertising done through Steam is not done by Valve, it's done by the games developer or publisher. There's no difference here than someone building a buggy game and putting it into a traditional B&M store, they cannot be expected to review every game for you and guarantee that every single title aligns with its advertising.

Steam is no different, it's just a store, a middleman for gamers and developers to trade through the service, if you have a beef with a title then it should be taken up with the developer/publisher and if necessary refunds can now be issued.

Obviously it's in valves best interest to pull highly problematic games to help protect their users, but it's not their moral responsibility to protect every consumer from making bad decisions, that's a really entitled opinion to hold in my view, every person is responsible for their own decisions and investigating if a game is worth it before they buy it, valve aren't your parents.

That is very likely. I fear the solution is gonna be a huge downgrade on the already limited visuals.

Probably, or they won't even bother with that, they'll just tell everyone to set the graphics on low. It's a shame but on the other hand I think the game is a bit of a nightmare as it stands already, it's far too grindy you have to spend hundreds of hours chopping down trees and mining stone to level up early game and it just becomes really boring. There's too much to lose on the PvP servers as bases are raided super easy and PvE servers are pretty boring.

I'll come back to it in a year probably and see what they've done with it, right now there's just too much wrong with it for me to get into it.

 

[stahlhart]

Thread cleaned and reopened. Next time it will be members getting cleaned.
-- stahlhart

 

[2is]

Early access, early access, early access... repeating it won't take the GameWorks stink out of it.

Early access has relevance to performance though, I think that's the part you're missing.

 

[Headfoot]

I like Ark but I'm waiting for the performance to come up more. Especially server side performance, if too many people are in an area you can have your graphics at minimum and its still unplayable

 

[tviceman]

Ya, that's a fair point about pricing but TW3 was one of the most anticipated games on the PC for years, and despite how broken it was, it was still in way better shape than early access ARK is. Yet it sold just 1.3M on the PC and 2.7M on consoles in the same time-frame. It'll be interesting to see what lifetime to date sales will be in regard to the split. Looks like CDPR was right that they could have never made this game if it was a PC exclusive since the finances don't make sense as PC sales alone wouldn't sustain the cost of developing it.

That is actually good PC sales. Broken down per platform, 1/3 PC 1/3 XB1, 1/3 PS4 (I have no idea if it actually sold equally on PS4 and XB1 I was merely pointing out PC sold as well). I'd guess that CDPR made more money on PC sales since they didn't have to pay for physical media, shipping, shelf space, console licensing fees, etc on the PC. And some of their sales were 100% profit on PC (GOG).

To make matters worse, with just 1 game, an entire decade of PhysX hype got wiped out ..... in a console game! Crackdown on Xbox One embarrasses PhysX on the PC. You know when developers are pushing the coolest things on a console game, that's when it's becoming clear as mud the PC is just there to get extra $ from AAA console ports but it's not a target platform for 90% of AAA developers.

Russian I know you are smart guy, but this is starting to look like you either are blinded by hate or are simply putting up the largest troll effort of the month. You're showcasing alpha footage of a console game that has no on screen action, no NPC's in motion, no AI at work, very mediocre visuals, and did I mention alpha game play footage? How many tech demos have we seen look amazing during demo stages and turn out to be crap? Too many to even make bringing up crackdown worthwhile.

Here's some food for thought... Mafia II back in 2010 had great physics (physx) effects going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdJ_-56svL0 Clothing, debris, destructible environments, and this was back in 2010. Comparing Mafia II to your alpha lifeless tech demo of crackdown makes crackdown look..... not that much better, if at all.

 

[Carfax83]

So you are saying TW3 selling 1.3M copies vs. 2.7M on consoles is not a failure? Project CARS bombing on the PC is not a failure? You provided no rebuttal to my comments instead just said I don't get AAA PC gaming market.

The Witcher 3 is a total commercial success on all fronts, including the PC. Those 1.3 million copies were just TWO WEEKS of sales. If the Witcher 3 had been a PC exclusive, the sales would have been even greater as the other platforms would not have cannibalized PC sales..

Basically, CDPR already made back all of the money they had invested plus a profit just from the sales generated from that 2 week window on one platform..

As for Project Cars, driving sims have always been a niche category on PC, much like flying sims.. Driving games do better on consoles generally speaking, so it's not surprising that the game sold better on the consoles..

However, that link you provided didn't count digital sales I believe..

That actually goes hand-in-hand with my comments above. They sell on the PC because might as well since we already made the game for consoles. Go back to any interviews with CDPR and they admitted the game would not be possible if it was made specifically for the PC. Could they have made TW3 only for consoles? Yup cuz it sold 2.7M copies which is enough to make decent $.

CDPR themselves had to eat crow, because they already made their investment money back in a short two weeks just from the PC platform.

So the PC platform could have easily financed the entire Witcher 3 development and marketing by itself.. Anything they've earned after the two weeks is pure profit.

The other way doesn't work. But here is the harsh reality despite the current gen consoles only having < 40M install base vs. > 150 million+ PC gamers, TW3 still sold 1.3M. You are defending that?

You know as well as I that the 150+ million PC gamers also include laptop gamers, MMOers, indie gamers, card games and other non AAA games..

DX12 is only going to increase the amount of viable gaming PCs in the future, so the PC game market will explode!

No one is arguing profits/profitability. We are discussing unit sales. However, if you want to go that route, most of the best selling PC games are cookie cutter AAA console ports, Blizzard titles, Battlefields, Borderlands, staple franchisees. If you take away the billions AK, Batman, BF title, it's not looking that great.

Who cares about unit sales. Developers make games so they can make money. If PC gaming was as bad at generating sales and profit as you're implying, then why do developers keep porting their games to PC, or using the PC platform as the lead platform?

I already said it'll be interesting to see the total lifetime TW3 sales.

There was six million sales of the Witcher and the Witcher 2 on PC over the course of about 5 years. Witcher 3 has been selling much more comparatively speaking than the first two games since it has been released.

And even more, the TW3 has the benefit of having GoG as a digital distribution channel at launch. Checking GoG right now, the Witcher 3 is still holding at 60 dollars, which means the sales must be strong indeed..

By now it has definitely surpassed one million sales on GoG, and one million on Steam, making well over two million sales between both Steam and GoG..

Well if you and railven are ready to drop $650 on new GPUs annually, I guess poor optimization of many PC games isn't a problem but is encouraged since it encourages upgrading. I guess it's everyone else' fault for not following your footsteps and expecting a 2015 game to run well on a $650 graphics card at 1080P:

i7 4790K + GTX980 Ti at 1080P - 20-25 fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-g36VzZdDQ

If ONLY this was the best looking PC game of all time! I guess it's not the developer's fault for not knowing how to optimize a game but our fault for not buying $650+ GPUs every 12 months.

This point is moot, since the game is still alpha and hasn't entered the optimization phase..

I guess I shouldn't be at all surprised given how you defended AC Unity, one of the worst GPU optimized games on the PC released in the last 2 years. I guess when the next AC runs like garbage on 980 SLI, no problem, just get $1300 980Ti SLI. Problem solved. Brilliant!

You don't even own AC Unity, whereas I do. AC Unity is far from being the worst GPU optimized game in the last 2 years. Batman AK takes that cake easily, plus there is Watch Dogs, the Evil Within and the list goes on.

I have all of these games unlike you, so my opinion counts for more

Seriously though RS, I wonder whether you do any PC gaming at all since you make so many hyperbolic and erroneous statements about it..

 

[kawi6rr]

NV is very lucky to have such customers. Keep on upgrading everytime they release something new, even when it isn't much faster like the 970/980 vs 780Ti, but they just neuter it in GW titles to make people upgrade anyway.

I mean if GW titles perform like neutral games:

780Ti owners could actually skip this gen and not buy NV's latest just because.

Nvidia have created quite a following of sheep!

 

[SimianR]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/594820656447032287/

So the latest community post from the developer on current and future patch notes lists this:

This Friday: - DirectX 12 Mode for Windows 10! Approximate +20% perf

I have it running on my main rig (i5 4670k + R9 290) but I am curious about trying to get it going on my ancient Q6600 that I'm throwing a Geforce 960 into I have no idea whether the CPU overhead/drawcall reduction would be something that would be included immediately, but I hope so

 

[tential]

So soon I'm excited to have another DX12 reference point.

 

[sxr7171]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/594820656447032287/

So the latest community post from the developer on current and future patch notes lists this:
I have it running on my main rig (i5 4670k + R9 290) but I am curious about trying to get it going on my ancient Q6600 that I'm throwing a Geforce 960 into I have no idea whether the CPU overhead/drawcall reduction would be something that would be included immediately, but I hope so

Horrible they don't put dates on the posts. What does "this friday" mean? Anyway I'm assuming that's today. I suspect they polished it up for the free weekend. I'm excited to try it.

 

[tential]

Horrible they don't put dates on the posts. What does "this friday" mean? Anyway I'm assuming that's today. I suspect they polished it up for the free weekend. I'm excited to try it.

It's a bad thing I agree but the last edit date at the time of news means it should be today.

Again, everything should be dated. Blogs with no date on when the article was written are my worst offenders. Not sure if theverge does that or not

 

[SimianR]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/520518053440119300#p1

ARK DirectX 12 Delay

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!

Well, that sucks.

 

[tential]

Game doesn't come out for 9 months anyway. Looks great though, that looks exciting to play. Direct X 12 performance in that game will be interesting to see the performance boost and how everyone lines up in that game with DX12.

 

[RussianSensation]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/520518053440119300#p1

Well, that sucks.

I've never seen a game developer stating they need help from AMD/NV to help them make the game actually work. This must be an all time low.

"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&#8217;ve reached out to both NVIDIA and AMD and will be working with them to get it resolved as soon as possible!"

I have little hope that this title will ever be well-optimized and even if it does manage to run decent at some point, it's basically going to be running on NV/AMD source code (well in this case sounds like mostly NV source code since this is a GW title). If this is the future of indie DX12 development, then we are screwed. :hmm:

On the positive side, it's good to see that developers are embracing DX12.

 

[SimianR]

Well, on the other hand there aren't any actual DX12 games out at the moment, so I was actually surprised to see them set such an aggressive release date for it, but I guess they over estimated the ease of transitioning from DX11 to 12. I'm not sure there is actually any Gameworks stuff in the game yet, we'll see if they ever get any of them working

 

[thesmokingman]

This was the first and only game I've used Steam's return policy for.

 

[Headfoot]

I don't think its far fetched to assume there are actual, real driver issues. The drivers are brand new, for both companies. No game is running on them in production. A whole new DirectX driver model is almost certainly a gargantuan effort to develop and QA. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Nobody has figured out how to do DX12 the best yet, since its not out. You can't google a technique in DX12 and find a tutorial or code sample the way you can with DX11. Give it time and people's knowledge will increase, the quirks will get discovered, and patches will be written.

Engine development is not simple.

 

[RussianSensation]

Nobody has figured out how to do DX12 the best yet, since its not out. You can't google a technique in DX12 and find a tutorial or code sample the way you can with DX11.

I am not a programmer, but it seems obvious based on how incredible Uncharted 4 looks (Naughty Dog admitted to using Asynchronous Compute for its low level Sony API) and Oxide games stating that AC allows for a performance boost in DX12 on GCN, and that DX12 takes full advantage of AC, it seems a great starting point for any DX12 game is to use AC.

Knowing this, and knowing that NV's Kepler and Maxwell have much weaker (some say software emulated) AC implementation, what do you think is going to happen when ARK Survival developer reaches out to AMD/NV to help them with DX12 game development? Especially since this title is a GW's game?

In this case, the best way to code the game could easily be using Asynchronous Compute engines which would cripple Kepler and Maxwell in ARK, so there would be a conflict of interest for ARK Survival's team to actually use the more advanced/superior DX12 coding.

 

[Headfoot]

The politicalness of the situation gets foggier too when you consider that at some point in this whole dev process, part of this work truly should be engine work for Unreal 4 done by Epic and not the dev licensing the engine. What I wonder is how is it that a small indie dev is getting DX12 compatibility out of the door before UE4 proper? And what will they do when UE4 gets native DX12 support baked in?

Maybe im just not enough in the know regarding UE4's dev schedule.

All I know for sure is that Ark is unplayable lagginess wise on my set up, 2500k @4.5 + 290 @1125/1250 +16gb ddr3 1600. Seems to be server side still. DX12 won't presumably help much with latency to and from the server or for processing done at the server -- perhaps just in the ability to reduce latency in sending packets due to lower CPU overhead client-side? I cant' imagine that's a big portion of the lagginess issue, but I could be wrong

 

[RussianSensation]

All I know for sure is that Ark is unplayable lagginess wise on my set up, 2500k @4.5 + 290 @1125/1250 +16gb ddr3 1600.

It's almost the end of 2015 and how is this game looking?

Cannot maintain 30 fps on this rig:

Intel Core i7 6700K 4.00 GHz
8 GB DDR4 RAM
2x Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 4GB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7HMEQUGows

Looks like this game is going to need a $1000 6950X + 16GB RAM + Pascal flagship GPU just to run well maxed out, unless some major optimizations happen before launch. Usually games that run this bad less than a year from release are unlikely to improve performance 2-3X which is what this game needs. It's going to be interesting comparing Far Cry Primal vs. this in terms of graphics vs. optimization trade-offs. This is easily my personal front-runner pick for the worst optimized PC game of 2016.

 

[Mercennarius]

This game currently runs better on Xbox one than it does the PC. DX12 update is supposed to come to PC within the next month and offer a substantial performance boost according to the developers.

 

[2is]

This game currently runs better on Xbox one than it does the PC. DX12 update is supposed to come to PC within the next month and offer a substantial performance boost according to the developers.

Hmm, i'm always skeptical about how effecgtive "patching in" DX12 can be.

 

[SPBHM]

This game currently runs better on Xbox one than it does the PC. DX12 update is supposed to come to PC within the next month and offer a substantial performance boost according to the developers.

"runs better"?
it looks a lot worse, it looks sub 720P,

if you lower settings heavily on the PC it's also probably going to be closer to a 30FPS target.

 

[Mercennarius]

"runs better"?
it looks a lot worse, it looks sub 720P,

if you lower settings heavily on the PC it's also probably going to be closer to a 30FPS target.

Point being similar graphical fidelity it runs far superior than the PC. I believe the game is running at 900P on Xbox One? The console optimizations are supposed to come to the PC version this month which will improve loading times and performance. They are suggesting a 20+% performance improvement just for moving to DX12.

 

[SPBHM]

Point being similar graphical fidelity it runs far superior than the PC. I believe the game is running at 900P on Xbox One? The console optimizations are supposed to come to the PC version this month which will improve loading times and performance. They are suggesting a 20+% performance improvement just for moving to DX12.

that can't be 900P, it seriously looks bellow 720P and there is a lot of detail missing,

are you sure that it really runs faster than a PC with similar settings?! the only comparisons I saw had way higher settings on the PC.