EDIT: Fixing ARK Crashes is tied to RAM

[Iron Chief]

Just as the title says, just a PSA. Too bad I guess.

For the record I have 64GB of 3600Mhz DDR4 RAM in Dual channel (2 sticks) and I am not sure if it's the game issue or my RAM, I don't have this problem in any other game. I do run like 30 Mods in ark, using less mods causes less problems. GPU is a 4090FE with no issue for the past year, and a Ryzen 5600x at stock speed.

I used to crash at around 24 active mods initially but with some changes I was able to run all the mods I wanted most of the time. If it does not work, I restart the game and that usually means it will work. However it was not easy, I had to do a little bit of research and work and honestly there are probably better ways around this problem.

I suppose I could also go back to my old 32GB ram sticks to see if that is more stable or play with the XMP memory profiles. I only have a mild OC to about 3600mhz on these Gskill sticks and they are rated for such. They seem stable in synth testing with AIDA64 but I only let them run a few hours.

More mods seem to drive up the frequency of game map crashing on start, but not always. I have realized certain launch parameter settings help out just enough to have less crashes on start.

Thou sometimes restarts are still needed because this method does not work reliably more than 60% to 70% of the time, but for me I used to crash 9/10 times before trying all this stuff with as many mods as I now use.

Method #1 that gave me the most success right away is changing steam launch option to lower memory use....even thou i have 64GB of Ram, I limit it to about 8GB...even thou the game doesn't always listen to me.

-high -maxMem=7999 -malloc=system

Now this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I pretty much came up with that after my own testing and reading forums, but hey, it gives good results.

I went from nearly always crashing to not crashing 6 out of 10 starts with that setting alone.

Basically I set the RAM to 7999 MB for ARK alone. Now when I look in Task manager while in game and I start the map, I watch that number. If it stays around 8500MB, the game starts fine. If it jumps much higher than 9000MB RAM utilization, it will crash. I am not a game dev so IDK why any of this is happening. Eventually the RAM use drops down a lot, even as low as mid 5000 MB when just idling in game.

Also the maxMem setting seems to control the ram use a little bit but not always, it occasionally goes as high as 10500 MB for ARK alone and that is a guaranteed crash.

Also when I use HYDRA (which is like a 3rd party Ryzen master kind of software for the CPU boost, it increases RAM use by ark and the game crashes almost every time)

Moving on.

Because I have a 6 core CPU (Ryzen 5600X) I have also tried combining these two launch options in steam

-high -maxMem=7900 -malloc=system
-force-feature-level-1 1-0 -cpuCount=6-exThreads=12

In either case it uses about 90% of the CPU for ARK ALONE on map start, then it drops to about 50% during game. It seems to help but I am not 100% convinced. Maybe it's a placebo effect.

I have also tried this launch parameter as well in addition to the other two just to force Direct X11, but I am not 100% sure if I see the difference in stability, seems to behave about the same, just looks like much uglier graphics.

-force-d3d11-no-singlethreaded -+fps_max 0 -high -nojoy -dxlevel 95

DX12 makes things prettier for sure, even with volumetric cloud off and volumetric fog off.
In game I now always run with the clouds and fog off.

Here is how to do it:
First bring up the console with ~ tilde key.
Then you want to type

r.VolumetricCloud 0
r.VolumetricFog 0

to change back just use 1 instead of 0


I hope this helps someone. This game is frustrating to run.
I am still testing and figuring this stuff out but I hardly have any time to play and test so I hope you guys take my information on the terrible RAM utilization of this game and find the hidden issue that makes it work this way.

Good luck

[manuelmorenomillan97]

what mods?

[Iron Chief]

Originally posted by manuelmorenomillan97:

what mods?

Oh man, i went down the rabbit hole a bit, please read my edited post. I edited that thing like 5 times as I was testing new launch options and playing around with settings.

Mods are not the entire problem, thou they certainly contribute to higher ram utilization. The real problem seems to be due to some threshold of ram capacity over let's guesstimate roughly 8500 MB...and I have 64GB of that stuff but it does not care. If I load in a map and the ram use for the game reaches like 9500 or 10500MB, it will crash instantly.

I did some tricks to mitigate the problem. Works about 6/10 maybe even 7/10 times without a crash on map start which means no crashes later on so far...at least for my 1 hour of testing.

There's probably a memory leak some where. Maybe I just have bad ram, but I doubt that. Idk... I wish I was a game dev so I can understand this stuff.