Ark: Survival Ascended, developed by Studio Wildcard and released on PC not long after its gameplay was seen for the first time during the Xbox Partner Preview demonstration, The Unreal Engine 5 remake was plagued with problems, ranging from major performance difficulties to crashes, although it received some favorable feedback on the changes. Even individuals who have high-end graphics cards, such as a GeForce RTX 4090, were experiencing issues.
The developer was aware of this issue and promptly issued an update to enhance the performance on the client side. We delivered a new client-side update today that will increase the frame rate of your game based on anecdotal input as well as hard data supplied by users. This update was made available tonight. In addition to a variety of enhancements, it offers “better settings” for the Graphics Quality option.
During the weekend, the developer also implemented more enhancements to client speed and generated a Pipeline State Object Cache to eliminate stuttering and hitching in the system. There is still work to be done, and the team is now dealing with “never-before-seen crashes” since the game became available to the public. “To tell you the truth, the floodgates had been unleashed, and at one point, servers were going offline quicker than we could put new ones online! The good news is that, as of our most recent server-side version, we have eliminated over 95% of server crashes, bringing the servers to a considerably more reliable condition.
The technical team will work on fixing the server performance concerns, and later this week, a branch of the Public Test Realm will be released so that players may experiment with “riskier optimizations” before such changes are included in the main game. Keep an eye out for further information, especially considering that the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 versions are still scheduled to release in November.