ARK Survival: Ascended has arrived on PC however the game is not the best when it comes to optimization. Tons of players are experiencing different issues in the game when it comes to framerate dips, stuttering, and even crashes. This is expected from a title that is currently in its Early Access shape and of this nature. The Open World of ARK Survival: Ascended is massive and it will take some time for the developers to fully optimize the game. In the meantime, you can use this ARK Survival: Ascended PC Optimization Guide to ensure that you are running the game in the most optimum form in its current state.
PC Optimization Guide – ARK Survival: Ascended
Before we begin looking into what settings will work the best for your optimum gameplay experience, it is important that you have a general idea of what the developers want from your PC in terms of minimum and recommended system requirements. We have listed both of them below for your reference:
Minimum Requirements:
- OS: Windows 10/11 (Upgraded to the latest builds and all updates installed)
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT or NVIDIA GeForce 1080
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet Connection
- Storage: 70 GB Available Space in SSD
Recommended Requirements:
- OS: Windows 10/11 (Upgraded to the latest builds and all updates installed)
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel Core i5-10600K
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet Connection
- Storage: 70 GB Available Space in SSD
After checking out both the recommended and the minimum PC requirements mentioned by the developer, you should know that in its current form, very few players will actually enjoy the game by running it on a PC even if they match the exact minimum requirements. ARK Survival: Ascended requires a lot of performance optimization at this point and due to this, the PC requirements are not really accurate so you cannot really follow them and expect the game to work optimally on your PC.
At this point, the game is running in Medium graphics even if you are running it at a system that matches the exact recommended PC requirements, so this makes PC optimization a real headache for ARK Survival: Ascended. However, at this point, there are a few settings and adjustments that you can do in order to increase the performance of the game as much as possible without sacrificing too much on the visual front as well as the frames and this guide will help you how you can do just that.
ARK Survival: Ascended PC Optimization Settings
To start off, you can first test out the two of the most generic settings to see how the game is performing on your system by testing out the default settings. Boot your game and head over to the Video section in settings. This is inside the General tab. From here, you can either select Medium or High and see how the game runs for you. If your game is running fine on Medium, select High but if you are experiencing stuttering and frame drops, you can start changing the settings from this point. According to the rule of thumb, keep increasing it a level until your game starts stuttering and dropping frames, and use that as a starting step for optimizing the performance of your game.
Two of the settings that require the most processing power from your GPU are the lighting and the shadows so you can check out the General Shadows settings and the Global Illumination Quality options first. Look at them and you can start by reducing them one step at a time. Reduce both of them by one step and then return to the game to try out the difference. The performance increase should be visible at every step you reduce since these two are the most demanding options in the settings. If you are happy with the performance now, leave the other settings untouched and enjoy your ARK Survival: Ascendance experience.
If you are still experiencing stuttering and framerate dips, move to Textures and Advanced Graphics. If Textures are something that you want to be good, you can look at View Distance instead. Reducing the View Distance will only reduce the distance at which you can see the objects, but it can give you that extra performance and framerate boost if you reduce this setting. Again, check the gameplay to see if you are satisfied with your game’s performance, and if not, you can move on to the next step. You can also cap your framerate at 60 FPS to ensure that you are at least aiming for the target which can be achieved fairly easily. If not, you can keep this option unchecked.
Another option that you can play around here for maximum performance impact is ‘Enable Foliage & Fluid Interaction’. You can try turning it off and on to see how the gameplay is affected by this particular setting. If you are experiencing increased performance and framerates by turning it off, consider keeping it off. Next, you can head over to the RTX tab and see what the default settings here are. In the Super Resolution section, you can check out the different settings and these will play a massive role in your game’s performance overall. You can choose between performance and quality and if you prefer, you can also go for the Balanced option. This gives you a good balance between performance and quality.
Ultimately, this is something that you will need to experiment with and try turning options on and off to see how the game behaves on your particular machine. The options we shared above are the most resource-consuming ones and they will resolve most of your performance issues once you try turning them off or on. You can also try the other basic options like Motion Blur and more but depending on your system, you will need to try some setups until the developer further optimizes the game and it starts using resources more effectively. Until then, you can use the guide above to optimize the performance of ARK Survival: Ascended according to your system and enjoy this gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 title.
That is all for this guide. If you need more help with ARK Survival: Ascended, check out additional guides linked below:
This concludes our ARK Survival: Ascended PC Optimization Guide. If you want to add anything to this guide, feel free to use the comments section below.
