Ark Survival Ascended GPU/Game performance help

[Mesarasi]

So im currently playing ASA on an RX 5700 XT, later this month i will be buying an upgrade to my gpu around the 500$ USD range. Any suggestions what i should get in that price range?

 

Im targetting Ark Survival Ascended for right now(1080p), but my goal is to upgrade to a 1440p monitor. Im currently looking at 2 options [Rx 7800 XT or RTX 4070] but am open to others

[Shimejii]

I would honestly suggest not trying to get that game to run well. Its Devs are awful, and they are well known for being some of the absolute scummiest when it comes to money and their complete lack of ability at being devs. Do not expect that game to run well at all even on a 4090 once you start getting your base built. ARK SE runs horrible once you actually have a decent sized base and a lot of dinos, now in UE 5 with lumen RT and such? Forget about it. Looks pretty though.

 

7800XT would be the easy choice here out of all the gpus in the 500$ range. 

[matt0725]

i watch a youtuber whos using a 4090 and has some stuttering and frame issues at 1440p.. to call the game unoptomized would be a discredit to the word. 

[Holmes108]

I'm on a Ryzen 5600, RTX 4070, and 32GB ram. I play on the high preset, but flip view distance to Epic.

 

At 1440 I run at about 30fps native, 35 with DLSS Quality, 40 with DLSS balanced, and then 60-70ish with Frame Gen on, depending on the DLSS level. 

 

There's been no Nvidia drivers updates related to Ark yet (at least none that specifically mention the game).

 

So just thought I'd provide a data point regarding performance. I'm sure it'll still improve some, as they've been releasing patches at a pretty rapid pace, but I'm not sure how far they can take it, as UE5 games in general seem to require some pretty beefy requirements with the best looking games so far.

 

Edit: Don't know if you use Reddit, but there's an /ark and a /playark subreddit (I personally prefer the latter, but both can be useful) with a lot of people giving performance info, including some additional console command specific things you can do to help with performance, regarding things like volumetric fog and clouds (adds 10FPS+). I can share some, if you aren't already aware of them.

[Stahlmann]

From what i hear it's exactly like the original Ark. Unoptimized is a gross understatement. They use one of the best engines out there, and yet they still manage to make the games perform horribly. Even today's top of the line PC's can't even run the original Ark maxed out. And the original game doesn't even look that good.

[Holmes108]

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

From what i hear it's exactly like the original Ark. Unoptimized is a gross understatement. They use one of the best engines out there, and yet they still manage to make the games perform horribly. Even today's top of the line PC's can't even run the original Ark maxed out. And the original game doesn't even look that good.

 

I find Ark (SE)'s reputation of running poorly to be grossly overstated. In the old days, there was something to that. But in the last few years it hasn't been my experience at all and I have 1000's of hours in.

 

Even my wife, who up until a couple of months ago was running an I7 4790K, and a 970 ran it just fine on 1080 high, 50-60 fps. I see nothing wrong with that. 

 

I ran on a mix of high and epic on 1440 over 100FPS on my old system, which was running a 2070 super. It only dropped to 50-60 fps in the most massive bases, which is to be expected, I think. 

 

Even the new Ark, while I am a little surprised at the horsepower required to get a decent FPS, if you compare to recently demanding games with surprising system requirements (particularly UE5), like Alan Wake, Plague tale, etc,  Ark 2 might not be all that far off the mark, considering what it's doing, being an open world, etc. They also claim the new engine will handle large bases much better, although I haven't gotten there myself yet to confirm, so time will tell in that regard. Hopefully it's true as we obviously don't have as much leeway to lose frames.

 

It's also early access, and has shown to scale down reasonably okay, to even being playable on a 1070, as reported by several people on Reddit. Part of the issue is many settings are hidden behind console commands, which is annoying. They need to bring more granularity through the settings menu, for sure.

 

Edit: I also respectfully disagree that OG Ark wasn't still a pretty good looking game.

[Stahlmann]

2 hours ago, Holmes108 said:

I find Ark (SE)'s reputation of running poorly to be grossly overstated. In the old days, there was something to that. But in the last few years it hasn't been my experience at all and I have 1000's of hours in.

 

Even my wife, who up until a couple of months ago was running an I7 4790K, and a 970 ran it just fine on 1080 high, 50-60 fps. I see nothing wrong with that. 

 

I ran on a mix of high and epic on 1440 over 100FPS on my old system, which was running a 2070 super. It only dropped to 50-60 fps in the most massive bases, which is to be expected, I think. 

 

Even the new Ark, while I am a little surprised at the horsepower required to get a decent FPS, if you compare to recently demanding games with surprising system requirements (particularly UE5), like Alan Wake, Plague tale, etc,  Ark 2 might not be all that far off the mark, considering what it's doing, being an open world, etc. They also claim the new engine will handle large bases much better, although I haven't gotten there myself yet to confirm, so time will tell in that regard. Hopefully it's true as we obviously don't have as much leeway to lose frames.

 

It's also early access, and has shown to scale down reasonably okay, to even being playable on a 1070, as reported by several people on Reddit. Part of the issue is many settings are hidden behind console commands, which is annoying. They need to bring more granularity through the settings menu, for sure.

 

Edit: I also respectfully disagree that OG Ark wasn't still a pretty good looking game.

I think part of my bad experience with the game is it's poor scaling on 4K. Even my 3080 only manages medium to high @4k while still hitting the 60 fps threshhold, at which point it doesn't look that good anymore. If i turn everything to 11 it looks reasonably good, but not good enough to warrant the level of performance required.

 

I'll be more specific in what i think looks bad in ARK:

- Textures

- LODs

- Bloom

 

Especially the low quality textures have a huge impact in image quality imo. The bloom is horribly overblown to the point where your whole screen basically turns white if you even look in the direction of the sun. You can turn off blinding effects to counteract it a bit, but the issue doesn't go away completely. LOD's, or distant objects have 2 issues: First, any tree more than 50 meters away turns into a 2D sprite that is of significantly worse quality than the 3D model, other games have much less noticeable transitions. Base building objects have horrible view distance. Sometimes a wall only renders in once you run into it. It only gets worse if you have ambitious builders on your server.

[Holmes108]

43 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

snip

 

Yes, foliage is probably the biggest improvement in Ascended, to be sure, along with the lighting. 

 

I'm really curious to see where these UE5 games go. Is it going to be "optimized" greatly for older hardware eventually? Can it even be (Whether it's the engine itself, or simply up to the devs to do)? Or is this just like a new generation of sorts, that just simply requires a massive upgrade. PC's have been really impressive over the last decade or so with how well old hardware holds up. But there just seem to be some sort of new line being drawn here, with the new engine plus the new hardware features on GPU's...

[Bass Player]

On 11/5/2023 at 9:55 PM, Shimejii said:

I would honestly suggest not trying to get that game to run well. Its Devs are awful, and they are well known for being some of the absolute scummiest when it comes to money and their complete lack of ability at being devs. Do not expect that game to run well at all even on a 4090 once you start getting your base built. ARK SE runs horrible once you actually have a decent sized base and a lot of dinos, now in UE 5 with lumen RT and such? Forget about it. Looks pretty though.

 

7800XT would be the easy choice here out of all the gpus in the 500$ range. 

Just wanted to mention that the problem is not with the Devs, who by all accounts are wonderful, but with the publisher, Snail Games, who consistently forces them to produce new content to make money rather than go back and fix old problems.

[Shimejii]

10 minutes ago, Bass Player said:

Just wanted to mention that the problem is not with the Devs, who by all accounts are wonderful, but with the publisher, Snail Games, who consistently forces them to produce new content to make money rather than go back and fix old problems.

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.