Required specs to run ark at max settings?

[JoshieDoge]

So im just curious what are the specs required to run ark at max graphical settings with abt 60 fps. Anyone knows what it is? Also if possible please help to write price next to each component in USD

[Unon]

Getting Epic on a i5-4670 [200$], and a Boost clocked 1080 Strix [750$] with 16 gigs of ram. [100$], Mobo, PSU, and case are undisclosed.

[AD33L]

Originally posted by NPC:

Getting Epic on a i5-4670 [200$], and a Boost clocked 1080 Strix [750$] with 16 gigs of ram. [100$], Mobo, PSU, and case are undisclosed.

60fps also in a huge base with 100+ dinos?

[Unon]

Originally posted by Ryudo:

Originally posted by NPC:

Getting Epic on a i5-4670 [200$], and a Boost clocked 1080 Strix [750$] with 16 gigs of ram. [100$], Mobo, PSU, and case are undisclosed.

60fps also in a huge base with 100+ dinos?

Was reading 60 to 70, with occasional drops to around 50 because of general unoptimization.

[Speedbump]

Originally posted by NPC:

Originally posted by Ryudo:

60fps also in a huge base with 100+ dinos?

Was reading 60 to 70, with occasional drops to around 50 because of general unoptimization.

1080p?

[Unon]

Originally posted by Rick Mason Mason Militia:

Originally posted by NPC:

Was reading 60 to 70, with occasional drops to around 50 because of general unoptimization.

1080p?

Yeah. Can keep a solid 60+ at 1440p on high.

[Speedbump]

Originally posted by NPC:

Originally posted by Rick Mason Mason Militia:

1080p?

Yeah. Can keep a solid 60+ at 1440p on high.

Well ♥♥♥♥ that makes me want to get a 1080.

[Shackled]

1080 is a tad overpriced, I use an AMD R9 390 and can go to 60fps when overclocked and it cost me like £250-300 for the card

[Unon]

Originally posted by Rick Mason Mason Militia:

Originally posted by NPC:

Yeah. Can keep a solid 60+ at 1440p on high.

Well ♥♥♥♥ that makes me want to get a 1080.

It's a expensive card, just stick to med-high on a 1070.

[Hades]

You also need to factor in screen resolution. I run a fairly beastly rig: 2560x1600, I7-6770 overclocked to 4.4Ghz, 32Gb, Gigabyte 1080, SSD. I turn off motion blur and anti-aliasing (I like crisp not blurred textures).... and on full epic I dip to 20fps and hover up to 28fps.

What I do instead is choose High setting, max out resolution scale and textures, turn on ambient occlusion (both) and HQ LODs... and turn off motion blur and HQ aniso filtering... and leave anti-aliasing to low.

That setting gives me a consistant 38fps, dipping to low 30s in busy places. Remember this is 2560x1600 res, not 1920x1080 (where I get 60fps but non-native resolution makes it look blurry as sh|te).

Cannot wait for a 1080ti and optimizations in Ark of course :)

[Hades]

I don't think anyone expects to run on all max settings. Like I said 4 years ago (lol)... turn on max settings and throttle back on the things you don't need. You didn't mention your resolution despite me mentioning this twice (lol)... but if you are trying to run 4k on max settings then the problem isn't your rig... it's learning to read.

[Rockenrooster]

What you need for ARK to run as "best as possible", you need the best single threaded performance as possible. Also what map you are playing plays a MASSIVE factor. In general, the bigger mod maps run even worse than the stock maps and official DLCs.

-So the highest clocked latest gen Intel CPU (OC'd) or a Ryzen 5000 series for CPU (no need OC) you can afford.
-RAM, at least 32GBs (high clocks preferred but not *as important* as CPU and GPU)
-GPU, it depends on Resolution. @1080p I have a RX 5700 non xt and I turn down shadows to med, but on the Island map I could probably run much higher. Probably at least a 3080 for 4k but you will probably be limited by CPU single threaded perf.
-Must have SSD, even though loading is also single threaded its runs faster on SSD. 500GB would be fine, but that's pushing it if you like mods. I have a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Huge bases WILL take a lot of the main CPU thread and bog down performance no matter the CPU, as that process isn't multithreaded at all.

ARK is not "hand optimized" and you have to "brute force it" to get better performance. I'm pretty sure its made entirely of UE4 Blueprints which runs worse than the native C++. Source: I mess around with UE4/UE5 a lot and even doing Blueprint "nativization" (an attempt to convert blueprints to C++) speeds up my packaged games A LOT.

Don't get me wrong, I love ARK and keep coming back to it even with all its problems. Mods are the main drive for me I think. I seriously hope that UE5 and better coding practices will fix all of the problems that ARK 1 had so ARK 2 will be much better optimized.

[klassakla]

Originally posted by Rockenrooster:

What you need for ARK to run as "best as possible", you need the best single threaded performance as possible. Also what map you are playing plays a MASSIVE factor. In general, the bigger mod maps run even worse than the stock maps and official DLCs.

-So the highest clocked latest gen Intel CPU (OC'd) or a Ryzen 5000 series for CPU (no need OC) you can afford.
-RAM, at least 32GBs (high clocks preferred but not *as important* as CPU and GPU)
-GPU, it depends on Resolution. @1080p I have a RX 5700 non xt and I turn down shadows to med, but on the Island map I could probably run much higher. Probably at least a 3080 for 4k but you will probably be limited by CPU single threaded perf.
-Must have SSD, even though loading is also single threaded its runs faster on SSD. 500GB would be fine, but that's pushing it if you like mods. I have a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Huge bases WILL take a lot of the main CPU thread and bog down performance no matter the CPU, as that process isn't multithreaded at all.

ARK is not "hand optimized" and you have to "brute force it" to get better performance. I'm pretty sure its made entirely of UE4 Blueprints which runs worse than the native C++. Source: I mess around with UE4/UE5 a lot and even doing Blueprint "nativization" (an attempt to convert blueprints to C++) speeds up my packaged games A LOT.

Don't get me wrong, I love ARK and keep coming back to it even with all its problems. Mods are the main drive for me I think. I seriously hope that UE5 and better coding practices will fix all of the problems that ARK 1 had so ARK 2 will be much better optimized.

Is this why the word blueprint is used so much internally for ark? I don’t know a whole lot about unreal engine/c++

[Rockenrooster]

almost certainly

[Lori37]

holy 2017 necro batman

[Trexdel]

I'd like to add to this thread, as my system spec is rather high-end.

I'm running a 9900k @ 5GHz on a Z390 motherboard. RTX 3080. 64GB DDR4 Memory @ 3GHz. OS is installed on an nVME ssd, and ARK has its own dedicated nVME ssd.

At max settings I am CPU limited. When 12th gen drops, I will be upgrading. And when the 40-series drops, I will also probably be upgrading :3

I play in 4k (resolution slider at 70%) with a mix of High & Epic settings, and average 75-110 FPS with VSync disabled. My screen resolution is at 1440p, but by playing in 4K with the slider lowered, I am able to get good frames and the resulting image looks way better than an anti-aliased one. I keep my screen's refresh rate set to 60hz, and my ARK VSync enabled. This allows some GPU overhead that I can use for recording videos / NVENC encoding.

When you are at the highest end of PC hardware, you NEED to make one decision to maintain frames above 60fps - and that is: Do you want Epic View Distance with Medium Shadows? Or Epic Shadows with Medium View Distance?

Having both of these set to EPIC will render my frames down to a bubbling 40 fps, even at 1080p.

At this point, you run into limitations of the game engine itself - these limitations exist regardless of how good or bad your hardware is, and regardless of the graphics settings or resolution you play at. I've got two good examples of the game engine limiting framerates:

1) Massive bases. Your CPU & GPU usage will plummet, and your frames will drop drastically. The game engine cannot handle pumping out tonnes of frames while loading that many structures. Not sure why.

2) Travelling very quickly (on a flyer, usually). These frame issues are especially apparent on the map Aberration - where while gliding fast on a rock drake can bring my frames down into the 30s. This mostly due to world-loading, and the engine struggling to keep up with your travel.

Happy 2017 necro everyone :D