Terrible performance on high-end PC

[seanterris]

I tried all the tricks in the fps-boosting book. I have a 5960X@4.2ghz with 2xTitan Z's and a lot of RAM. right now i have every single setting on Low except for draw distance (which is on epic and i need it to be like that). I play in 1080p. I usually have around 25fps, rarely hitting over 30 inside of structures. The test were also done on a fast, empty server. I ran out of ideas, please help!

[Fuel75]

Sounds about right currently with the specs you provided. SLI isnt in game yet, so you are using 1 Titan.

[EVILE-VON-OVERKILLE]

Some of you can try this...

If using a Good Mid Range or Higher Nvidia card

1.Set Antialising To LOW
2.Set sky slider to the last letter
3.Set ground clutter to the last letter
4.Set Both Shadows on LOW!!! THIS ONE IS MOST IMPORTANT AS IT HAS GREATEST IMPACT ON GAMES OVERALL FEEL OF SMOOTHNESS.
5.Set distance to high
6.Turn OFF motion Blur
7.FOV ALL the way to the right
8.Cam Shake OFF
9.Set resolution to 1400x900 or try 1600 because with textures and post processing on EPIC it still looks better than any 1920x1080 game

In The Nvidia Control Set These

Anistropic Filtering OFF
Antialiasing FXAA OFF
Antialiasing mode OFF
Antialiasing setting NONE
Antialiasing transparency OFF
Max Pre Render use 3D app
Power Management Maximum Performance
Shader Cache Global ON
Texture filtering anisotropic sample Optimization OFF
negative LOD bias ALLOW
Tex filtering QUALITY
Triliear optimization ON
Threaded optimization OFF
Triple buff ON
V sync ON
Virtual Reality Pre Render frames USE 3D APP SETTING

If Playing ONLINE

1.Find a SERVER in your region and do not just look at the LISTED pings and pick the best one as in this case that number wont always PERTAIN TO YOU.
2.Check your In game PING before putting hours into a server because if it dont FEEL right its not.
Just Google servers in your region Prior to starting game.

!!!FORGET THOSE COMMANDS AND INI ALTERS LESS YOUR ON LOW END PC!!!

They will make the game ugly and take so much away from it there not worth it except if you have no choice.

These have all worked greatly for me but with PC systems so Diverse might not for you but worth a shot at least.

[Moga CMDR]

game is far from optimized...its not your hardware.

[Damian]

Turn of sli for this game. Its not supported yet. Run a 2k resolution. Turn everything to epic. Turn shadows into high. Turn off motion blur. And there's your 30 fps. Don't expect much out of the game yet. Its still slow smoother than it used to be.

[RAYtracer]

Originally posted by Faddy_Hardbuckle:

Some of you can try this...

If using a Good Mid Range or Higher Nvidia card

1.Set Antialising To LOW
2.Set sky slider to the last letter
3.Set ground clutter to the last letter
4.Set Both Shadows on LOW!!! THIS ONE IS MOST IMPORTANT AS IT HAS GREATEST IMPACT ON GAMES OVERALL FEEL OF SMOOTHNESS.
5.Set distance to high
6.Turn OFF motion Blur
7.FOV ALL the way to the right
8.Cam Shake OFF
9.Set resolution to 1400x900 or try 1600 because with textures and post processing on EPIC it still looks better than any 1920x1080 game

In The Nvidia Control Set These

Anistropic Filtering OFF
Antialiasing FXAA OFF
Antialiasing mode OFF
Antialiasing setting NONE
Antialiasing transparency OFF
Max Pre Render use 3D app
Power Management Maximum Performance
Shader Cache Global ON
Texture filtering anisotropic sample Optimization OFF
negative LOD bias ALLOW
Tex filtering QUALITY
Triliear optimization ON
Threaded optimization OFF
Triple buff ON
V sync ON
Virtual Reality Pre Render frames USE 3D APP SETTING

If Playing ONLINE

1.Find a SERVER in your region and do not just look at the LISTED pings and pick the best one as in this case that number wont always PERTAIN TO YOU.
2.Check your In game PING before putting hours into a server because if it dont FEEL right its not.
Just Google servers in your region Prior to starting game.

!!!FORGET THOSE COMMANDS AND INI ALTERS LESS YOUR ON LOW END PC!!!

They will make the game ugly and take so much away from it there not worth it except if you have no choice.

These have all worked greatly for me but with PC systems so Diverse might not for you but worth a shot at least.

Great job, at 28-30fps now. Thanks

[seanterris]

I know SLI is not supported right now, they said with DX12, this should make a lot of folks happy and should be worth waiting for. That said, I was hoping that the second card can be utilized in some way. Forcing SLI in any mode I tried (any I could :P) made it choke or not launch at all. I was hoping there would be a way to dump AA or ports of post processing on it?

Lowing res will definitely improve the performance. I play on 4k tv though, which does a pretty good job upscaling fhd content. Even colors etc are more lively, not sure if those are the tv's shortcoming or is it simply that lower res images dont carry enough info to reproduce it as well. Gonna try to stick with 1080p for now, I understand it's Early Access but it's 2015. Besides, what machines were the promo trailers recorded on?
Not sure how FOV affects the performance and not checking, I want to keep playing on max to be ready for vr :)

I refreshed all settings yet again and gonna try to find things that most affect my performance, maybe it will be helpful to someone. Few observation so far:
game performs differentely for different scenes it renders. huge shock, i know :) the best levels of differences i could come up with:

E - stands for "empty" screen, as in looking straight on the ground or straight up. i also get similar results looking out to the sea on the beach or when in small buildings

M - stands for "middle" screen, think when you travel through greenlands and there is few trees, few rocks, maybe some dinos. maybe it's just my choice of home area but this is what i get on most of the time

F - stands for "full" screen, but could as well stand for "forest", because that is where it chokes the most for me. any scene where the alot of objects need to be rendered will be an F scene. even single trees can take couple of fps off my counter when i look straight at them, forests seem to take at least 30% independent of settings

i know this is simplified, but im not a beta tester damn it, and this ain't even beta* :P

i spawned in a few different points of the map and those performance "levels" seem to hold most of the times, as in the performance will be similar in most scenes with the same amounts of details/objects to render. that at least looks like more or less stable engine that needs optimization for particular scenarios rather than something that would need to be scrapped after a year because it can barely keep up with players walking (achooorustooo).

Starting point: 1080p, no nvidia profile (so no vsync etc, i have an issue messing with profiles for something in so early stages; that said i have 'full performance' and 'single display performance' set on globally), every setting on low (including every slider, every possible graph option unchecked), except for internal resolution (more below), which is on max. using steam counter and common sense to get fps (steam overlay doesnt seem to affect performance). im not interested in local play, so im testing on an empty, rather fast server with fair ping (toolkrust.net:7777 you are all welcome:P)

E - over 40 fps, more like 45 and up. not sure what takes fps away at this point. better than this i dont hope to get without going lower res. cant complain too much with amounts of patching being deployed, so lets wait and see.

M - 35 to 45 fps most of the time. rarely below 33, usually when too many trees are on the screen.

F - around 30 fps, sometimes below that, especially when running.

even with low fps game plays and feels smoothly. it looks really bad though, even for early access, wont be passable even between vr enthusiasts i think. dinosaurs' models still look pretty good, i wonder how much that affects the performance. arks doesnt seem to affect it at all from a distance, and not that much from up close either. megalodhons lvl36 shouldn't be fought with fists while naked.

during night all of the areas seem to get around 5-7 fps gain.

time to play with settings. one thing i noticed, is that ark takes some time to load the new settings. even though changing it in menu seem instant, after what's on your screen loaded the game still applies new settings to objects that you dont see, or at least it feels like it does, since after applying new settings i seem to have lower peformance for at least several seconds, to sometimes as long as a minute or so. the point where it finishes is easy to catch too if you follow the counter. bear it in mind when testing/comparing:

- internal resolution/resolution scale: lowering this helps the performance, but makes the image blurry. the performance gains are lower than what you would get for choosing lower resolution in the first place, and with worse image quality. i would love to know what exactly this slider affects.

- view distance: there doesnt seem to be much difference between low and high in terms of quality. the game looks and feels much better though, the island is beautiful and low res textures and meshes doesnt look that bad from a distance. this i could play in vr. max 1-2 fps loss. epic is a bit more demanding, and will take 3-4 fps sometimes. i think its worth it, but for now i will stay on high.

(playing with AA at this point and it doesnt seem to be that heavy on gpu even on epic... i guess it doesnt have that much work in the first place yet)

- ground clutter - on max i seem to be getting 20-35% fps hits comparing to on lowest. if the ground bothers you that much i guess you can experiment somwhere in the middle. not worth it imho

- sky effects - 40% at least, but most of the time over 60% performance hits on max... ridiculous. sky looks ok on lower settings, im keeping it on lowest with ground clutter.

- post processing - my favourite so far. on high it does better than on medium/low for some reason. only way i can make sense of it is medium/low settings rely more on CPU for horsepower. in any case, setting post processing on high costs at worst 3-4 fps, but usually gains around 3fps. epic usually costs around 3fps, sometimes 5-6, it looks really good tho. i would stay on epic if it meant steady 5 fps drop, but instead it fluctuates, making the game feel jumpy and stuttery. it still looks good on high and feels much smoother.

- word tiles buffers - doesnt seem to affect performance at all, i guess its only dependant on how much memory you want waste on ark. setting on epic, i hope it wont affect other results that much (not exactly sure what are those "tiles" that are getting buffered)

(night again so another quick test: general shadows (from low to epic) seem to hurt around 30% in fps, terrain shadows seem to have no noticable effects, and at least during the night the game performs pretty much the same for me with textures on low and on epic...)

gonna play with the rest a bit later...