The eagerly awaited action role-playing game Lost Ark will soon be launched in Europe. Shortly after its release, it will receive support for DirectX 11. But what does that bring?
On 11 February, the eagerly awaited action role-playing game Lost Ark will finally be launched in the West after several years of waiting. The release will be accompanied by a powerful technology upgrade. The isometric ARPG with a medieval fantasy setting will receive DirectX 11 support shortly after its release in February. So far, only DirectX 9 is available. But what can we expect from the upgrade?
What is DirectX anyway?
DirectX is a Windows-specific 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. For the latter, we are talking about 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 released in 2002 and was further developed until 2010 to DirectX 9.29, which counts as DirectX 9c. DirecX 11, on the other hand, appeared 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 they can use (for example, which shader model). DirectX Raytracing, for example, is an extension for DirectX 12 that is not available to DirectX 11.
In addition, with each new DirectX version, attempts are made to minimise the so-called overhead, i.e. the performance that gets stuck in the programming interface before anything arrives at a game at all. Then there are various advantages regarding the utilisation of cores and threads of the CPU as well as the computing units of the GPU. To put it in a nutshell: DirectX 11 allows for better performance with a potentially better look than DirectX 9.
What does DirectX 11 mean for the performance of Lost Ark?
Luckily, there is already a comparison video that not only gives a visual impression, but even reveals details about the performance. But beware: it may contain spoilers:
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 large battles. There, we sometimes see over 70 per cent more frames per second (in the video at time index 5:58). In slower scenes, DirectX 9 is sometimes minimally ahead, but this is only rarely the case. Most of the time, DirectX 11 is clearly ahead here as well. For gamers, however, the big battles in raids are of particular interest.
Due to the better utilisation of the computing cores, the so-called frame times (time in which a picture is calculated) also seem to be smoother under DirectX 11 than under DirectX 9. This is especially important in order to avoid annoying jerks and micro-jerks.
What do you think? Is DirectX 11 a real upgrade for Lost Ark? Are you looking forward to the action role-playing game at all or do you, like Maurice, fear a Pay2Win disaster? Feel free to write it in the comments!
