Frankly I feel a bit odd writing a post that amounts to “14-year-old rendering tech works better than 20-year-old rendering tech”, but Lost Ark – 2022’s biggest surprise hit so far – has only recently come around to the benefits of DirectX 11. While it’s the default rendering option in the western version that launched last week, the original South Korean version went years with just DirectX 9 to its name, and the press build that I used for performance testing (and Ed is using for his review-in progress) remains locked to DX9. Despite the fact that, as I’ve confirmed from testing the release build as well, DX11 provides a tidy performance gain over its predecessor.
