ARK: Survival Evolved just received an update that implemented Xbox One X support, showing a rather massive difference from the game’s visuals on standard Xbox One.
In order to achieve a better insight on what the new console can and cannot do, DualShockers spoke with Creative Co-Creative Director Jesse Rapczak, who talked about his experience.
Rapczak explained that the gulf between Xbox One and Xbox One X is definitely big, and it’s “much larger” than the one between PS4 and PS4 Pro. First of all, the Xbox One X has much more memory available to developers, which allows them to fit higher-quality meshes and textures into the game, and to improve draw distance.
The GPU is also “really a monster.” According to Rapczak, “it’s almost not possible to overstate how much more powerful” the Xbox One X’s GPU is than those of the other consoles.
On the other hand, the only thing that the folks at Studio Wildcard wish were a little more powerful is the CPU, and Rapczak thinks that this is a common feeling among developers. On the flipside of that, if the CPU was more powerful, it would probably make making games that take advantage of both Xbox One and Xbox One X a bit more difficult.
While it’s relatively easy to just add more visual features that take advantage of the more powerful GPU, a faster CPU would open the door to more “complexities,” enabling additions that are more deeply linked to the game’s logic. That would get developers in a situation in which they’d have to enable or disable game features instead of just eyecandy.
Rapczack also explained that he thinks that there is definitely headroom left to achieve even better results with the Xbox One X. A lot of the current games benefit from the fact that Microsoft did a lot of work to make its two consoles compatible, but most of them were created with Xbox One, PS4 and PS4 Pro in mind. Rapczak feels that as developers, Wildcard’s included, get used to the pipeline brought about by such a large difference in power, they’ll start to make their games and engines take much better advantage of the performance gap, and deliver higher-quality games that can run across both targets.
If you want to read more from Rapczack, you can also check out his thoughts on a sequel for ARK: Survival Evolved, and on the possibility of a Nintendo Switch port.