Discussion on Ark: Survival Ascended and FPS games
Discussion on Ark: Survival Ascended and FPS games
I see this as a specialized discussion on the forum, but I’m eager to hear from those with deeper technical insight. I’m using a 3080 (10GB) card running Ark with DLSS enabled at 50% resolution scale from 2560x1440. All graphics settings are set to Medium, and I frequently adjust UE5, shadows, and other parameters. While I tweak things, my frame rate stays around 80-100 FPS on Extinction and similar maps, then drops to the 40s as time goes on. Switching textures from Medium to Epic instantly brings me back up to that range. This happens repeatedly while playing, so it’s a recurring issue. My main concern is VRAM usage—my card only has 10GB, and I’m wondering if changing texture sizes could free up more memory. I expected this to happen instantly, but it doesn’t seem to resolve the problem quickly enough. I’m considering upgrading my graphics card soon and hoping to avoid such fluctuations. I recognize each game will behave differently.
ARK is frequently met with these problems. Even with a better GPU it won’t solve everything. As more dinosaurs or structures load, frame rates drop steadily until you’re forced to quit the game. ARK SE struggles with large structures exceeding a specific dimension (probably around 10x10) and certain materials like metal or Tek can severely impact performance. You’ll also need to check if spawns are problematic—remember there was a recent spawn bug with wyverns that caused over 5,000 to spawn at once, leading to FPS drops across the server. Ark Asc runs on Unreal Engine 5 and has its own challenges with VRAM and resource usage. I haven’t played Ark Asc since it was just a low-budget attempt by the studio to raise funds for ARK 2 after they ran out of money.
Thanks for the response. It looks like the problem isn't related to spawning and Ark is known for its performance issues. It's cool that some players with different setups don't experience these problems. One user on a 6800 seems to maintain around 80 FPS consistently, which is impressive. If this were an issue tied specifically to Ark/UE5, we'd expect similar results from others.
They might lack the RTX capabilities. I understand UE5 includes RTX-specific adjustments that influence performance (for example, in Fortnite my settings used ray tracing in dx12 mode instead of dx11, which noticeably improved results), but I’m not sure if this feature will appear in the ARK ASC settings menu.
It's accurate. A console command exists, but its effect isn't clear at the moment.