ARK: Survival Evolved is a game that evokes mixed feelings for me. On one hand, it offers a vast open-world survival experience teeming with Jurassic creatures. On the other hand, it exemplifies many issues plaguing the modern gaming industry, including excessive microtransactions, questionable practices, and poor optimization.
The game initially launched as an early access title in October 2014 and officially released in August 2017. Despite garnering an 83% rating on Steam from 520,000 reviews and becoming a staple for many gamers, it has its fair share of drawbacks.
One prominent issue is its consistently poor performance. Built on Unreal Engine 4, ARK: Survival Evolved has suffered from significant optimization issues. Studio Wildcard aimed to address this by promising a patch that would introduce support for the DirectX 12 API, which was expected to particularly benefit AMD Radeon GPUs. This move was crucial as AMD cards were notably disadvantaged on ARK: Survival Evolved at the time.
Studio Wildcard originally promised a DirectX 12 patch for ARK: Survival Evolved back in 2015, setting an anticipated release date of August 29th. However, this update never materialized. Interestingly, just before this, the game was announced to integrate NVIDIA’s GameWorks SDK.
This timing coincided with the DX12 patch’s disappearance, possibly due to DX12’s preference for AMD Radeon GPUs over NVIDIA’s GTX hardware, given how the likes of Studio Wildcard were more than happy to work closely with a company as large as NVIDIA, especially receiving free hardware as a bonus which is vital for a small startup studio.
Setting aside GPU hardware sponsorship shenanigans, ARK: Survival Evolved maintained its popularity despite significant performance issues, thanks to a thriving modding community. This community contributed so much additional content that game installations could easily exceed hundreds of gigabytes, akin to heavily modified versions of Skyrim, though that’s a separate matter.
However, Studio Wildcard’s decision to capitalize further on their success led to the introduction of ARK: Survival Ascended. This new iteration, built on Unreal Engine 5, which is infamous for its troubled PC releases due to poor asset optimization and heavy reliance on features like Nanite, resulted predictably in subpar performance and unstable frame rates.
ARK: Survival Ascended entered early access on October 26th, 2023, garnering a mixed reception. Critics pointed out that Studio Wildcard essentially re-packaged their original game with superficial enhancements, priced at $45 USD. Notably, despite worse performance, the studio also introduced monetization through community-made premium mods in this latest release.
These premium mods differ from the free mods found on platforms like Steam Workshop, where Ark players can freely create and share their modifications. The introduction of premium mods allows creators to earn money from their efforts, encouraging them to develop more advanced and refined content.
While this practice isn’t new, Bethesda did something similar with Skyrim in the past, fans often react with understandable hatred whenever such monetization is implemented.
As a result, the game garnered an overall rating of just 58% from 49,000 reviews on Steam. Many players viewed these practices as Studio Wildcard scamming their customers.
Despite changing engines, ARK: Survival Ascended has failed to address the numerous bugs, glitches, and performance issues that plagued the original game’s development cycle, which have now been exacerbated. This is particularly notable since the game is also accessible on mainstream consoles like the Xbox Series platforms and Sony’s PlayStation 5.
However, the console ports of ARK: Survival Ascended have turned out to be hilariously disastrous.
According to Digital Foundry, ARK: Survival Ascended lacks the traditional quality and performance modes found in modern console games. Instead, it offers a single mode aiming for 60FPS, resulting in a significant drop in graphical fidelity across various console hardware.
Digital Foundry reports that ARK: Survival Ascended mostly runs at 720p on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, with the image upscaled to 1440p using checkerboard rendering. However, the end result is far from impressive, highlighting the game’s dire optimization.
The levels of detail and immersion are astonishingly poor. The Xbox Series S, often seen as the neglected stepson of consoles that neither consumers nor developers prioritize, struggles significantly. Its dynamic resolution can drop as low as 450p, underscoring just how poorly optimized ARK: Survival Ascended truly is.
Interestingly, despite being inherently weaker in both CPU and GPU capabilities, the Sony PlayStation 5 seems to outperform Microsoft’s flagship console in terms of texture quality.
Considering that the PC version of Ark Survival Ascended recommends 32GB of system memory, excluding the additional large pool of memory featured on traditional graphics cards, the poorer texture quality on Xbox compared to the PlayStation 5 likely stems from its needlessly complex and retarded dual memory configuration.
For instance, the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S use a shared memory buffer between the CPU and GPU. The PS5 has 16GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory interface, providing an effective bandwidth of 448 GB/s. In contrast, the Xbox Series X has 10GB of its memory operating at a faster 560 GB/s, while the remaining 6GB is limited to 336 GB/s.
The Xbox Series S, the less powerful of the two, has 10GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit memory interface, yielding 224 GB/s bandwidth for the 8GB reserved for the GPU. The remaining 2GB, allocated for the system, operates at just 56 GB/s on a 32-bit interface, this likely explains why ARK on XBOX Series S looks rather detailed for the Nintendo 64.
This memory configuration likely explains why developers have not prioritized optimizing for the Xbox Series S, the worst-performing system of the latest generation. This limitation poses a significant challenge for developers, although it seems Studio Wildcard opted for a straightforward port, as their game clearly relies heavily on memory.
The game is virtually unplayable on PC, even with high-end hardware, unless you rely on artificial upscaling techniques like NVIDIA’s DLSS. ARK has always been notorious for its performance issues and glitches, but this iteration seems more like a generic mobile asset flip than a true next-gen experience.
Because that’s exactly what the game is: a re-released version of ARK: Survival Evolved on the new Unreal Engine 5, but still unoptimized and riddled with issues. The textures and props are so washed out and flat on the Xbox Series S that it appears tessellation has been completely disabled. Even with these compromises, the game still runs poorly.
All consoles run ARK: Survival Ascended at 30-50 FPS under these settings, with frame rates dropping below 30 FPS in more demanding situations. The only redeeming feature is that PS5 and Xbox Series S|X users can access a PC-like console command. This allows for Unreal Engine 5 tweaking, offering settings adjustments that can somewhat improve frame rates.
Despite being in early access and featuring premium game mods, Studio Wildcard is already focusing on “ARK 2,” the sequel that perhaps should have been their main project. Scheduled for release in 2025, ARK 2’s development underscores that ARK: Survival Ascended is essentially an asset flip of a game long criticized for its poor performance that somehow manages to be even worse than the original in terms of relative hardware of its release.
