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PC Performance Analyses

NVIDIA RTX 4090 can run ARK: Survival Ascended with 60fps at Native 4K only at Low Settings

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Studio Wildcard has just released ARK: Survival Ascended, the remake of ARK: Survival Evolved in Unreal Engine 5, in Early Access. The game uses Unreal Engine 5 and it’s currently a big mess on PC. It has numerous graphical/visual glitches, some really bad animations, and abysmal performance, even on the NVIDIA RTX 4090.

For our initial benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, as well as the GeForce 545.92 driver.

In ARK: Survival Ascended, the developers use Unreal Engine 5 with some cool features like Nanite and Lumen. But there’s a big problem with Lumen in this game. If you watch the video until the end, you’ll notice some serious issues with the lighting in the forest area. The trees glow super bright, like Christmas trees, which makes everything look weird and not good at all.

And it’s not just the lighting. The game’s Day/Night cycle doesn’t look good either. Instead of smoothly going from day to night, the game shifts the sun around in a bumpy way. This makes the shadows move in a jerky and really annoying manner. It doesn’t look good at all.

ARK: Survival Ascended does some things well. It doesn’t have a lot of objects suddenly appearing out of nowhere, and sometimes it can look really good, especially when you’re not moving. You can even move the bushes and grass, which is a cool detail. So, despite its graphics problems, it’s not a terrible-looking game.

However, ARK: Survival Ascended has ridiculously high PC system requirements. At Native 4K, the mighty NVIDIA RTX4090 can only push framerates higher than 60fps at Low Settings. Everything else and your framerate will drop below 60fps. Yeap, you read that right. Here is a game that makes the NVIDIA RTX4090 beg for mercy.

At Native 4K/Epic Settings, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 could initially push 20fps. This performance is similar to the Path Tracing effects of Alan Wake 2. And while Lumen is a form of Ray Tracing, it does not justify this kind of performance. Studio Wildcard released today the first performance update for this title. This update improves performance by around 5-10fps, and the following 4K benchmarks are after applying this patch.

ARK Survival Ascended 4K benchmarks

What’s also inexcusable here is that this patch automatically adjusts the resolution scale. On the Epic Preset, the developers locked the resolution scale to 70% (so we had to use manual settings to get proper results in Native 4K). On the Medium Preset, the resolution scaler drops to 56%. Jesus Christ Studio Wildcard, that’s not how optimization works.

The good news, at least for owners of the RTX 40 series, is that ARK: Survival Ascended supports DLSS 3 Super Resolution and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. By enabling both of them, we were able to come close to a 60fps experience. Still, even with the full set of DLSS 3, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 can easily drop at 50fps in 4K/Epic Settings.

Scalability also appears to be all over the place. At Native 4K/Medium Settings, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 is constantly below 60fps. By lowering the settings to Low, we were able to get 75fps at 4K. However, the game looks really bad and it’s full of pop-ins on Low Settings.

Now contrary to games like Cities: Skylines 2, ARK: Survival Ascended is in Early Access. Studio Wildcard claimed that the game will stay in Early Access until the end of 2024. Thus, we should not be judging the game’s performance at the moment. Still, it’s ridiculous how bad this game runs on the NVIDIA RTX 4090.

In short, stay away from it, even if you are a die-hard fan of ARK. And no, this isn’t representative of how future Unreal Engine 5 games will run!

ARK: Survival Ascended - Native 4K vs DLSS 3 - Epic Settings - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090