DF : Ark Survival Evolved on Switch - 360p (docked) / 216p (handheld) goodness!

[Mr Puggsly]

curl-6 said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Right, Ark is exceptional when it comes to bad Switch ports. I can't imagine we'll see worse than this.

Although, any game that's doing 60 fps with a reasonable resolution on X1 seems like a good candidate to work well on Switch. I mean the latest BF games would likely work better on Switch than the latest AC games.

Yeah I think this is as bad as it gets honestly, it'd be tough to get any uglier than this muddy, buggy monstrosity. I'm still kinda shocked this was actually allowed to release like this in this day and age. Reminds me of when Life of Black Tiger hit PS4, that blew my mind too, that at no stage did somebody put their foot down and say "guys, no, this just won't fly."

And yeah, being 60fps on the stronger consoles definitely makes it easier to port to Switch.

I think Snake Pass is an interesting example of a cross-platform title, as another UE4 game. It's 864p/30fps on the base PS4/Xbone and 675p/30fps on Switch, though they make up the difference by parring back some of the game's more subtle effects like water caustics and depth of field, so that the basic look is quite similar while still closing the performance gap in ways that aren't super noticeable.

With some visual compromises Snake Pass could probably be a 60 fps game on base X1 and PS4 though. The Pro and X1X plays it at a locked 60 fps so the bottleneck on base consoles are probably not the CPU when you consider how easily the mid gen upgrades handle 60 fps. Any game the mid gen upgrades can play at 60 fps well are technically not CPU intensive games because they weren't given a huge upgrades per se.

Ark is also a GPU heavy game, which is probably why the Switch version has a surprisingly okay frame rate. I'm suggesting the base X1 and PS4 versions of Ark would actually run well if they lowered the visuals further. The X1X version even hits 60 fps if you drop all the visual settings to the lowest.

Frankly, the visuals of the mobile version of Ark seems like what all the consoles should have received. It looks okay, it looks kind of like an Elder Scrolls game on 7th gen consoles with better lighting.