Digital Foundry dives into ARK: Survival Evolved's Switch revamp

By this point, we’ve all heard about the amazing work done with Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch, which took a very shoddy port and turned it into something extremely impressive. Of course, the question is just how impressive? Well, the Digital Foundry gang has put the revamp through its paces to see how things have come together.

You can watch the extensive breakdown of ARK: Survival Evolved on Switch above, which gives you a ton of details on every little element that has been redone, reworked and tweaked, or you can check out the CliffsNotes below!

• Switch revamp based on a recent Xbox codebase running on Unreal Engine 4.26
• targets 1080p and 720p for docked and portable play respectively
• uses dynamic resolution working in combination with TAA upscaling
• DRS window varies from 55 percent to 100 percent of output resolution
• shadow map quality is massively improved
• uses cheaper SDF shadows for more distant shading
• Unreal Engine 4’s run-time virtual texturing is deployed to intelligently manage assets
• adaptable scalable texture compression reduces the data footprint overall
• loading completes in around 24-25 seconds
• stuttering fixed
• problems with texture data not loading at all is also fixed
• LOD pop-in (while still present) is improved by an order of magnitude
• user interface has been substantially improved
• fairly complex areas hover in the 24-27fps area
• less stressful environments hit the game’s 30fps cap
• frame-rates can reduce further during online modes