Summary
As the successor of Ark: Survival Evolved,Ark: Survival Ascendedhas built and expanded upon its creature-taming, Survival formula. The only problem is the game has some serious optimization problems to fix,as made clear by the playerbase’s grievanceswith less than ideal, overall performance.
As time goes on, Ark: Survival Ascended will become more optimized, and performance will improve, but if you’re absolutely dying to play the game without it feeling like a fancy slideshow about dinosaurs, give these workarounds a try to see if it helps your FPS. For most, losing a bit of graphical quality and fidelity is a fair exchange for increased performance.
Some of these tips involve console commands. By default, you open the console with the “~” key. If you’re not well-versed with the console,check out this guidefirst. “Performance” is quantified by increases to average FPS.
8Update Your Graphics Drivers
Whether you’re rocking with teamNvidia,AMD, or Intel, it’s a good idea to either update your GPU drivers, or rollback to previous driver versions if you’re comfortable doing that, to see if you notice any improvements to overall performance.
Considering that most modern GPU drivers that you download are bundled with proprietary software that allows you to easily update everything with the click of a button, this is a quick, potential fix that could resolve possible hardware or game engine performance problems and incompatibilities.
7Disable Volumetric Clouds
As it turns out, the clouds in this game eat up a noticeable chunk of graphical resources. Typing “r.VolumetricCloud 0” into the console will disable any clouds that render shadows or interact with volumetric fog and light in some way.
After enacting this command by hitting the enter key, you should see a noticeable increase to your FPS. Plus, the sky still looks quite good without volumetric rendering. If you don’t like this change, you may turn volumetric clouds back on by typing the same command, but with a “1” at the end instead of a zero.
6Disable Volumetric Fog
If you don’t mind losing a bit of immersion or realism, disabling volumetric fog not only helps with FPS, but also gives you an advantage in PvP and PvE activities; you’ll be able to see through forests, treelines, and other dense foliage much more clearly.
Go ahead and type “r.VolumetricFog 0” into the console, and you should notice the semi-opaque haziness that typically floats around nearby trees disappears. The only reason you might turn this setting back on is for snowy biomes, as they do feel a bit “off” without fog.
5Get Rid Of Water Reflections
While there is a command that will do away with displaying any water in the game entirely, that isn’t exactly ideal, especially if you don’t want to suddenly fall into a random body of water, or see aquatic creatures “floating” in what would appear to be open air.
Instead, you can type “r.Water.SingleLayer.Reflection 0” into the console to disable water reflections, which will save your GPU some resources when it comes to rendering lights. This does make water look more flat and boring, but it will help performance, especially near coastal areas.
4Disable Grass
If you’ve played or seen gameplay of Ark: Survival Ascended with maxed out settings, you probably noticed there’s a ton of grass in this game. While this is a bit of an extreme tradeoff for performance, disabling grass will absolutely boost your FPS.
If you type “grass.Enable 0” into the console, you will slowly but surely notice all the grass in your game disappear. Since there is so much grass rendered on the map, it takes the game a few minutes to enact the command.
3Tinker With Your Resolution Scale
While you should almost always keep your Resolution setting the same as your monitor’s resolution, such as 1920x1080p, you can try to see how far you can drop your resolution scale until the degrading of graphical details becomes unbearable for you.
If your GPU is powerful and recent enough to utilize performance-boosting technologies with tolerable losses to graphical quality, such as Nvidia DLSS, or AMD FSR, try playing with those settings alongside the in-game Resolution Scale setting. Otherwise, you might want to leave this setting alone and tinker with others.
2Lower Overall Settings
In terms of performance, it’s never a bad idea to try bringing your game’s overall settings to the Medium or Low presets. If you want to go for a more customized and nuanced performance boost while trying to preserve graphical quality, try:
1Upgrade Your Hardware
While this solution isn’t exactly realistic or tenable for everyone, purchasing and installing more powerful hardware, mainly your GPU and CPU, but also memory and storage components, such as RAM and NVME or SATA SSDs, is the most direct pathway to increasing overall performance.
Depending on what you can afford, you might not even need to make sacrifices for graphical quality. Unlike the developers behind Ark: Survival Ascended, though, it’s understandable if you can’t afford mid to high-end GPUs, like an RTX 4070 or an RX 7800 XT.
