Ray tracing mod for Ark??

[UrmomlovesGoats]

is ANYONE working on this??? please..... it would be AMAZING. after watching all this stuff about the minecraft ray tracing mod, I was really thinking about Ark.

[Vesuvius]

If its not in the modkit... its not in the modkit.

[UrmomlovesGoats]

not in the mod kit? was Alien and Predator in the mod kit? or monster hunter?

[Ancient]

I think you misunderstand what the minecraft mod (SEUS) is. It's been mischaracterized as ray tracing: It's not ray tracing, but path tracing which is an OpenGL shader technique.

Since what we'd likely get is Nvidia's RTX real-time ray tracing, it's important to note that it has some steep requirements, none of which really help it's case as far as being possible for ARK:

• It requires D3D12 (DX12). ARK is a DX 10.1/DX11 game.
  
• It requires Windows 10 and the October 2018 Update (version 1809), because Ray tracing was only added to D3D12 as part of the WDDM 2.5 update.
  
• Ray tracing so far has been shown to cost 30-50% FPS in the games that do use it. That's not going to be a good look for a game like ARK that is already very demanding even on the best of hardware.

Why not add path tracing to ARK as a mod then? Well, it's simple: Path tracing is a shader operation, and custom engine shaders are disabled in the ARK DevKit. Modders can only add assets to ARK: models with materials and material shaders, add dinos, items and structures or change the functionality of any of them, change blueprints or crafting requirements of existing items, make maps, etc. but the core engine functionality such as the global lighting shaders or things like the screen space reflections the game uses are not customizable by modders.

Adding such a feature would not be a mod, but a change/option added by Wildcard. Because ray or path tracing are very, very expensive operations, it's not likely we'll see them added to already demanding games like ARK or GTAV any time soon. Maybe in 5 years when we have RTX 4080 Tis and either ARK has been ported to D3D12 (we're still waiting on this since 2015[www.eteknix.com]) or we get ARK 2 and it's been built from the ground up with DX12 and RTX features in mind.

Path tracing works in minecraft because minecraft has very simple low poly models to bounce path tracers off of. Ray, or worse, path tracing a high-poly scene like we see in ARK would likely take minutes or even hours, not the fraction a second needed to give you a fluid frame rate. Even in minecraft, SEUS cuts FPS to approx. 10%, turning 500-600+ frame rates into 50-60+ frame rates.

Can you even begin to imagine the outrage from people running ARK at 60 FPS today if a new feature like path traced global illumination was added that dropped their performance to 6 FPS (likely it would be much less than that due to the high-poly nature of the game's assets)? And then the outrage that Wildcard spent developer man hours to implement such a useless feature?

[simon]

Ark + Ray tracing = 0 FPS.

[Ancient]

Originally posted by simon:

Ark + Ray tracing = 0 FPS.

Probably 15-30 FPS at 1080p/Epic on a 2080 Ti with DLSS. Even then, it would be a slideshow for the sake of 0.25% of steam users that even have an RTX 2080 Ti that could get that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unplayable FPS out of it. It would be good for getting screenshots.

ARK's biggest graphical flaw is the screen space reflections that cause all those fun water reflections, and the whole game engine is practically built around that garbage lighting schema that was only acceptable in 2014 when preliminary work on the game began.

[Engineer]

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