Improve GPU and game performance on Ark Survival Ascended
Improve GPU and game performance on Ark Survival Ascended
You're considering upgrading your GPU soon, aiming for a 1440p display and targeting Ark Survival Ascended at 1080p. Right now you're evaluating the RX 7800 XT and RTX 4070 as potential options. Feel free to explore other suggestions if needed.
I’d really advise against trying to make that game perform well. The developers are terrible, and they’re infamous for being extremely bad at handling money while lacking any real skill as developers. You shouldn’t expect it to run smoothly even with a decent base on a 4090. ARK SE performs poorly once you’ve got a solid-sized base and many dinosaurs. In UE 5 with Lumen RT and all that? It just doesn’t look good. The 7800XT seems like the best bet among the affordable GPUs in that price range.
I observe a YouTuber employing a 4090 with some stuttering and frame problems at 1440p. Asking to launch the game would be disrespectful to the term.
I'm using a Ryzen 5600, RTX 4070, and 32GB RAM. I play at the high setting with Epic view flipped. At 1440p I get around 30fps natively, 35 with DLSS Quality, 40 with balanced DLSS, and then 60-70fps when Frame Gen is on, depending on the DLSS level. There haven't been any Nvidia driver updates for Ark recently (besides those that mention the game itself). I thought I'd share a performance number here. I'm sure it can get better, since they keep releasing patches quickly, but I'm not sure how much more improvement is possible, especially with UE5 games needing demanding specs. The latest patches seem to push requirements higher, and some console commands might help boost performance—like adjusting fog and cloud settings which can add over 10FPS. If you're not on Reddit, there are subreddits like /ark and /playark where people share detailed tips and tricks.
It seems almost identical to the initial Ark version. The performance is far from ideal despite using a top-tier engine. Even now, high-end PCs struggle to run the full version at its maximum settings. The original game itself doesn’t appear very polished either.
I believe Ark's past reputation of lagging is exaggerated. Back then there were legitimate concerns, but recently my experience has been very different. My wife, who used an I7 4790K and a 970, managed to run it smoothly at 1080p with 50-60 fps. On my older system, I achieved over 100fps on 1440 resolution and high settings. Even the latest Ark version still feels reasonable compared to more demanding titles like Alan Wake or Plague Tale, especially given its open-world nature. While the new engine promises better performance in large worlds, I haven't seen it yet, so results may vary. Early access has shown solid scaling, even reaching playable speeds on a 1070. Some settings remain hidden in console menus, which is frustrating; more detailed options would be helpful.
I believe part of my issue with the game is its weak scaling at 4K resolution. Even with my 3080, I can only achieve medium to high quality at 4K while still maintaining around 60 FPS. Once I set everything to 11, it looks decent but falls short of the performance needed. In ARK, I notice several problems:
- Textures – low-quality ones heavily affect visuals.
- LODs – distant objects suffer from poor transitions; trees beyond 50 meters become flat 2D sprites.
- Bloom – the effect is overly intense, turning the whole screen white when facing sunlight. You can disable it but it doesn’t fully resolve the problem.
These issues make the game less enjoyable, especially for detailed environments.
Foliage stands out as the main advancement in Ascended, alongside the lighting improvements. I’m eager to track the future direction of these UE5 titles. Will they receive significant optimization for older systems eventually? Is this improvement driven by the engine itself or solely by the developers? Or is it essentially a shift toward a new era that demands a major hardware upgrade? Over the past ten years, PCs have shown strong performance with aging components. Yet here appears to be a distinct transition, relying heavily on newer GPU capabilities.
The Devs may be wonderful people, they are not good at being competent devs. Lets not pretend to wipe away history, theyve had their clear issues with MANY parts of the game. Ive had discussions with the devs, and they themselves made many of the decisions that lead to some of the biggest issues in Ark SE. Snail games is not faultless, being the ones that own them and can cause massive issues. This is what happens when you sell your company to another, you lose those aspects of freedom.