Ark: Survival Ascended is out on PC but performance is lacking

Last night during the Xbox Partner Preview stream, we finally got a good look at Ark: Survival Ascended gameplay. What wasn't mentioned on the stream was the fact that the PC version was launching imminently. The Unreal Engine 5 remake of the game is now officially available but you may want to hold off on picking it up for now.

Ark: Survival Ascended is a complete remake of Ark: Survival Evolved, this time in Unreal Engine 5 and taking advantage of some of the engine's impressive new graphics technologies. The game dropped yesterday evening but at the time, there were not new graphics drivers released to support it.

Note: These screenshots are taken with max graphics settings – we were getting about 10 frames per second. 

The game looks very impressive visually thanks to new lighting and foliage, bringing a new level of life to the maps. However, there are no Game Ready drivers available at the time of writing. On an RTX 3070 Ti with a Ryzen 5800X, the game struggles to get above 30FPS even at low settings with DLSS on. However, this was with the game installed on a SATA SSD. Moving it over to a faster NVMe M.2 SSD improves performance, but we're still unable to reach anywhere close to 60FPS.

Currently, it seems that the game could do with both some patches, as well as driver optimisations from the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Intel to get the game running well across a wider range of graphics cards.

Given that this game also supports DLSS 3, the lack of organisation and day-one driver support is somewhat baffling as most titles using Nvidia's RTX features do get a Game Ready driver. We hope that there will be new driver updates soon to help polish the experience up. In particular, I think the driver will improve DLSS performance as the feature does not seem to be performing entirely correctly right now.

While the game is hitting gaming rigs pretty hard, this is also an Unreal Engine 5 game with a lot of new graphical features thrown in, so a performance hit over the original game should be expected but we still believe there is a lot of room for improvement.

For reference, these are the game's minimum and recommended system requirements:

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, Nvidia GeForce 1080
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 70 GB available space
• Additional Notes: SSD Required

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K
• Memory: 32 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 70 GB available space
• Additional Notes: SSD Required

Ark: Survival Ascended currently has mixed reviews on Steam, with many of them calling out crashing issues and general frame rate problems. While the reviews aren't all positive, the game is still attracting a lot of players, with almost 39,000 concurrent players right now at the time of publishing. That number will likely grow over the weekend.

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KitGuru Says: Have you picked up Ark: Survival Ascended already? What do you make of the new version so far? 

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