GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 120.00 secs

[El Khan]

Quite a few of us encounter this error. The game freezes on or just after character creation.

Can you communicate about it / share your experiences?

Adding the -dx11 parameter only leads to another Unreal engine 3D error.

[El Khan]

Hello... any news about this error today?
Game crash at character creation screen: frozen process, 0% gpu/cpu, timeout error message after 120sec.
rtx3060 but not only. But it seems to be only for nvidia cards?
Tried nvidia studio driver / geforce experience driver ==> SAME

[CarTrack]

Tried everything but nothing worked, so I spent 5 days testing different console command.

This command fixed all the crashes for good on Medium, 1920x1080:
ark.VertexCountScaling 1

[CarTrack]

To create the character you will need to launch the game with -dx11
Then after you create it, exit the game and remove the launch parameter.
Otherwise you will lag a lot.

Then you can start the game and use this console command to fix the crashes:

ark.VertexCountScaling 1

You will need to type it each time you start the game.

[CarTrack]

To avoid crash:
Console command: ark.VertexCountScaling 1
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Foliage Quality: Medium
Enable Foliage & Fluid Interaction = OFF (right top)
Disable HLOD = ON (right down)

With these settings the game doesn't crash anymore.
And I'm on a GTX 1070!

[El Khan]

woah
Ok i just spent my first 10 minutes ingame thanks to this settings
Gonna try to join a server now!

I'm still puzzled, I'm afraid it'll freeze up again at any moment, I'll see what happens, but I've really had 10 minutes without a crash in solo mode.
My cpu was at about 50% and so was my graphics card ~45% (rtx3060). Graphics weren't great (general indicator on low + your modifications afterwards) but nothing to do with the -dx11 mode.
Thanks
I'll get back to you.
If you have any more info on how to improve graphics without crashing/freezing, I'd be interested.

[CarTrack]

Great to hear about that. I'm going to repeat this so everyone can benefit.
I'm on a GTX 1070, already bought a RTX 2060 Super from eBay for $199 which is arriving soon. In my country we can import for up to USD 200 tax free, anything above that and we have to pay USD 200 more plus 60% so it's really 2 times more expensive.

You can set the Preset to High or Epic but just make sure after you do that you will need to redo the settings:

GUIDE To avoid crash:
=================
Console command: ark.VertexCountScaling 1
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Disable HLOD = ON (right down)
UI => Disable Menu Transitions (left down)

The foliage doesn't seem to be an issue now.