Ark Survival Ascended is a remake of Evolved using the Unreal Engine 5, featuring cutting-edge visuals, including Lumen GI, Nanite Geometry, and Virtual Shadows. Unfortunately, the performance is far from ideal, requiring frame generation even on the fastest PCs. Furthermore, the shadows are prone to artifacting, and upscaling/frame generation options are limited. Here’s our optimization guide for Ark Ascended, with console commands at the end.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Ark: Survival Ascended PC Requirements
Min
- OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit.
- CPU: Intel Core i7-6800K|Ryzen 5 2600X.
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080|AMD RADEON RX 5600 XT.
- Memory: 16 GB.
- Storage: 70 GB (SSD).
Rec
- OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit.
- CPU: Intel Core i5-10600K|Ryzen 5 3600X.
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080|AMD RADEON RX 6800.
- Memory: 32 GB.
- Storage: 70 GB (SSD).
Ark Survival Ascended: Resolution & Graphics Presets
Ark Ascended performs miserably on even the fastest GPUs, averaging a paltry 38 FPS on our GeForce RTX 4090 at 4K “Epic.” Switching to 1440p improves the framerates to 57 FPS, while 1080p produces an average of 68 FPS at the highest quality preset.
Test Setup
- CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Ark Ascended exhibits decent scaling across graphics presets. The “Epic” quality preset averages 53 FPS at 4K (DLSS Performance). The lower quality presets average:
- High: 59 FPS (+11%).
- Medium: 69 FPS (+30%).
- Low: 83 FPS (+57%).
Ark Survival Ascended (at the time of publishing) comes with AMD Frame Generation enabled on all platforms. It can’t be disabled from the settings, but a simple command does the trick. Open the command line using the “`” button, and type the following:`
- r.FidelityFX.FI.Enabled 0
- Hit the enter key.
- This disables AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation which can cause frame pacing issues on certain systems.
- Unless explicitly mentioned, all our tests were conducted with FSR 3 FG disabled.
Advanced Graphics & View Distance
Advanced Graphics control multiple effects, including lighting, shadows, and grass. Consequently, it drastically impacts performance, reducing framerates by up to 7% at the epic quality settings.
- High (7%) disables certain ambient shadows, mostly affecting terrain and vegetation.
- Medium (2%) reduces the quality and density of volumetric fog.
- Low (0%) disables atmospheric light scattering.
View Distance sets the LOD of various objects in the scene. It primarily affects foliage, vegetation, terrain, rocks, clouds, and the wave/ripple detail on the surface of water bodies. It mildly impacts performance, ranging from 4-5% at the higher quality options.
- Epic and High look almost the same.
- Medium culls nearby terrain shadows and most intermediate terrain geometry.
- Low culls intermediate-to-distant vegetation.
- Terrain, vegetation, and clouds are reduced at every step.
Post Processing & General Shadows
Post Processing adjusts various late-pipeline shaders, including ambient occlusion, depth of field, vignette, and other blur-based effects. Higher quality settings can reduce performance by 6-8% and is best left at high or epic.
- High (5%) reduces bloom and fast blur, which is quite evident on foliage.
- Medium (4%) further reduces fast blur and disables tonemapping (emissives).
- Low (0%) completely disables fast blur, ambient occlusion, and adaptation.
General Shadow Quality sets the Virtual Shadow Map Samples and shadow penumbra (SMRT ray count) for the in-game shadows. They reduce frame rates by 7-8% at the epic quality. Lowering the quality makes the shadows less defined, with noisy penumbras:
- High (4%) mainly reduces the shadow map resolution with a slight reduction in penumbra quality.
- Medium (4%) produces deformed shadows with particularly noisy edges.
- Low (0%) disables soft shadows in favor of sharp, blocky placeholders.
- The Virtual Shadows in Ark Survival Ascended suffer from severe flickering and artifacting.
- They can be disabled using the command, “r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable 0.”
- Disabling Virtual Shadows grants a 4% FPS boost.
Global Illumination & Cinematic Lighting
Ark Ascended utilizes Lumen GI at the epic quality setting. Lower quality options use distance field and screen-space global illumination. Lumen (Epic) can reduce your framerates by 12-15%, dramatically improving the scene lighting.
- High (3-4%) switches to Distant Field and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
- Medium (0%) uses only SSAO.
Cinematic Lighting increases the Lumen GI quality (global->mesh distant fields?), but can severely undermine performance. Upon enabling it, our frame rates dropped by 25% (53 FPS->40 FPS) on an NVIDIA RTX 4090.
- It improves GI quality by covering finer geometry, including vegetation, smaller rocks, pebbles, etc.
- That said, the difference is minimal.
Effects & Foliage Quality
Effects Quality enabled additional lighting shaders, including color, reflections, etc. It reduces the game’s performance by 4-6%, and it’s best left at high.
- High (3%) reduces lighting quality, including global illumination coverage and color vibrancy.
- Medium (1%) further reduces color detail and disables reflections.
- Low (0%) reduces color detail and enables some sort of low-quality bloom.
Foliage Quality sets the density and frequency of grass, pebbles, and rocks on the surface. It can bring down your framerates by up to 10% at 4K. Luckily, anything higher than the lowest option looks good enough. Medium is a good choice if you’re running low on FPS.
Foliage Interaction Distance
Foliage Interaction enables physics for grass, bushes, and trees. The foliage interaction distance multiplier, distance limit, and quantity limit adjust the range and amount of foliage-related physics simulations in the game.
- This affects the parting or bending of vegetation when you pass through it and the knocking over of trees by large creatures.
- Out of the three settings, the distance multiplier is particularly detrimental to performance.
- Reducing it to 1 grants a 5% FPS boost, and you retain most nearby foliage interactions.
- The other two don’t impact performance much and can be left at 3 or higher.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Ark Survival Ascended (at the time of posting) features only DLSS upscaling. Users on AMD and Intel GPUs can use the resolution slider to enable some form of temporal upscaling which isn’t much worse. The balanced and performance modes are 29% and 46% faster than native 4K. Upgrade to DLSS 4.
AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation can disabled/enabled using the “r.FidelityFX.FI.Enabled 0/1″ command. It grants a 60-70% FPS boost at 4K at the cost of imperfect frame pacing. Nonetheless, the game is playable for those running 60 FPS displays as long as you enable V-Sync.
Ark Survival Ascended: VRAM Usage
Ark Ascended is quite the VRAM hog, courtesy of Nanite, Virtual Shadows, and Frame Generation. The game uses over 18 GB of VRAM at 4K and 17 GB at 1440p/1080p using the epic quality preset (without upscaling or frame generation).
Enabling DLSS reduces the VRAM usage to ~13 GB at 4K while scaling down the texture quality brings it down to 10 GB. Using frame generation and cinematic lighting increases the VRAM usage to a whopping 21 GB. Finally, some competition for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Ark Survival Ascended: CPU Bottlenecks
Like most Unreal Engine 5 titles, Ark Ascended is well-optimized for modern multi-core CPUs. The game remained GPU-bound even at 1080p with a Busy deviation of under 5%. Enabling frame generation can produce strange results as the frame-pacing is off the charts.
Ark Survival Ascended Performance Summary
- Foliage Interaction Multiplier: Reduce it to 1 for a 4-5% FPS boost at no visual cost.
- Global Illumination: Reduce it to high which disables Lumen, granting a 10% uplift.
- General Shadows: Disable Virtual Shadows using the below command, and reduce it to high for a 10% performance gain.
- Foliage: Reduce it to medium quality for a 7-8% FPS improvement.
- Advanced Graphics: Reduce it to medium for a 6-7% increase. Consider last.
Ark Survival Ascended PC Optimization Commands
- r.FidelityFX.FI.Enabled 0
- Disables FSR 3 Frame Generation. Useful if enabling V-Sync doesn’t smoothen out your frame pacing, and reduce VRAM usage.
- r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable 0
- Disables Virtual Shadows which can cause flickering, and slightly improves performance (+4 to 6%).
- r.Lumen.Reflections.Allow 0
- Disables Lumen-based reflections, granting an 8-10% FPS boost near water bodies.
- r.VolumetricCloud 0
- Disables volumetric clouds, granting a massive 15%+ performance boost.
Optimized Settings for Ark Survival Ascended PC (2025)
| Graphics Settings | High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K (3480 x 2160) | 1440p (2560 x 1440) | 1080p (1920 x 1080) |
| FPS Target | 60 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Frame Generation | On | On | Off |
| V-Sync | On | On | Off |
| DLSS Quality | Balanced | Balanced | Balanced |
| Advanced Graphics | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| View Distance | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| Textures | Epic | Epic | High |
| Post Processing | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| General Shadows* | Epic | High | High |
| Global Illumination | Epic | Epic | High |
| Effects | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| Foliage | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| Foliage & Fluid Interaction | On | On | On |
| FI Distance Multiplier | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| FI Distance Limit | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| FI Quantity Limit | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Disable HLOD | On | On | On |
| Cinematic Lighting | On | Off | Off |
| CPU | Core i7-13700K|Ryzen 7 7700X | Core i5-12600K|Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-12400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 4080 Super | GeForce RTX 4070 Super | RTX 3060|RTX 4060 |
| Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
Ark Ascended Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti & RTX 4060
Ark Ascended requires frame generation for playable performance on lower-end hardware. We attained consistent 60 FPS frame rates on a GeForce RTX 3060 + Core i5-12600 PC using the below optimized settings.
| Motherboard | CPU | GPU | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSI PRO B760-VC WIFI IV | Intel Core i5-12600KF | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12 GB|AMD Radeon RX 6600 8 GB | 16 GB x2 D5 |
| Graphics Settings | RTX 3060 12 GB | RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB | RTX 4060 8 GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1080p | 1080p | 1080p |
| FPS Target | 60 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Frame Generation | On | On | On |
| V-Sync | On | On | On |
| DLSS Quality | Balanced | Balanced | Balanced |
| Advanced Graphics | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| View Distance | Epic | Epic | Epic |
| Textures | Epic | High | High |
| Post Processing | High | High | High |
| General Shadows* | High | High | High |
| Global Illumination | High | High | High |
| Effects | High | High | High |
| Foliage | Medium | High | Medium |
| Foliage & Fluid Interaction | On | On | On |
| FI Distance Multiplier | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| FI Distance Limit | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| FI Quantity Limit | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Disable HLOD | On | On | On |
| Cinematic Lighting | Off | Off | Off |
