The long-awaited action role-playing game Lost Ark will start on February 11th Several years of waiting finally here in the west too. The release is accompanied by a powerful technology upgrade. The isometric ARPG with a medieval-themed fantasy setting will receive support for DirectX 11 shortly after its release in February. So far, only DirectX 9 is available. But what can we expect from the upgrade?
You can find out how much we liked the beta for Lost Ark in our podcast:
Lost Ark beta
The “Diablo MMO” surprised us
What is DirectX anyway?
DirectX is a Windows proprietary collection of programming interfaces (APIs). These in turn are responsible for input devices such as controllers, but also audio and of course the display of 2D and 3D graphics. The latter is then called Direct3D. Game engines, such as the Unreal Engine 3 used for Lost Ark, are linked to DirectX.
What are the differences between DirectX 9 and DirectX 11?
DirectX 9 was already published in 2002 and was further developed to DirectX 9.29 by 2010, which is part of DirectX 9c. DirecX 11, in turn, was released as part of Windows 7 in 2009 and was updated up to version 11.2 in 2013.
Basically, DirectX versions differ in their range of functions, or in which instruction set extensions you can use (for example which Shader-Model
). For example, DirectX ray tracing is an extension for DirectX 12 that DirectX 11 is not available.
DirectX 12 Ultimate announced
But you need the latest hardware
For this purpose, with each new DirectX version, an attempt is made to minimize the so-called overhead, i.e. the performance that gets stuck in the programming interface before something arrives at a game. Then there are various advantages in terms of the utilization of cores and threads of the CPU as well as the processing units of the GPU. To put it briefly: DirectX 11 enables better performance with a potentially better look than DirectX 9.
What does DirectX 11 mean for the performance of Lost Ark?
Fortunately, there is already a comparison video that not only gives a visual impression, but also reveals details about the performance. But be careful: it can Spoiler be included:
Link to YouTube content
The recordings were made on a system with AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070. The resolution is 2,560 x 1,080, so it is Ultrawide Full HD (UWFHD) in 21: 9 format.
The advantages of DirectX 11 are particularly noticeable in scenes with many characters, such as major battles. There we sometimes see over 70 percent more images per second (in the video at time index 5:58). In slower scenes, DirectX 9 has a slight edge, but that is rarely the case. In most cases, DirectX 11 can clearly stand out here as well. For players, the big battles in raids are of particular interest anyway.
Due to the better utilization of the processing cores, the so-called frame times (time in which an image is calculated) also seem to be smoother under DirectX 11 than under DirectX 9. This is especially important to avoid annoying stutters and micro stutters.
Preview
Lost Ark is an almost perfect MMO for Diablo fans
What do you all mean? Is DirectX 11 a real upgrade for Lost Ark? Are you looking forward to the action RPG at all or, like Maurice, fear a Pay2Win disaster? Feel free to write it in the comments!
