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  • ARK Survival Evolved - Optimization Still Possible

    Over the past year there's been a lot of discussion in Ark-related media about clientside video(game) optimization. This post isn't about that.

    It's about how to immerse yourself as best possible while trying to find a symbiotic balance between budget, quality and performance.


    For some tweakers it's a no-brainer. We can't afford both so we typically have to sacrifice one for the other. But which way to go... graphics or performance? Decisions decisions.

    The Options below are what work best for me and Oz (until new data and/or further experimentation take place. *whistles*).

    These may not be the best tweaks out there but they're quick and easy and don't involve changing any .ini files (but we have that too if you're interested/want to discuss.) These are based on our mid-end GTX 660's.






    In short, if you're using a low/mid-end card and just want decent graphics and speed, this might help. Or it could blow your shit up. Who knows. I take no responsibility (see what I did there?)

    If these don't work for you, try mucking around with them to best suit your own particular specs. The base settings appear sufficiently tweakable for the average player. It'd be handy though if they used tooltips to describe what each option changes.

    Just remember: any time you mess around with your settings you have the potential of making things worse. And since one of my favorite sayings is "it was working fine, so I fixed it (duggyism)" ... I wouldn't listen to a word I say.



    Later Edit: As posted on survivetheark.com earlier tonight, v242.8 was released. This patch is, imho, headed in the right direction for the kind of balance I mentioned above. We're testing it out now on the DragonShadow server. So far the FPS is running great with textures turned up high. Some glitchiness but overall perf is pretty smooth. Let's see how it runs on Epic.


    Current Version: v242.8
    * Multi-Threaded networking system for substantial (~15%) sever performance improvement. More perf gains to come soon too!
    * Fixed exploit where Chairs could be used to clip into people's bases.



    Definition of Multithreading courtesy of whatis.techtarget.com:

    Multithreading is the ability of a program or an operating system process to manage its use by more than one user at a time and to even manage multiple requests by the same user without having to have multiple copies of the programming running in the computer. Each user request for a program or system service (and here a user can also be another program) is kept track of as a thread with a separate identity. As programs work on behalf of the initial request for that thread and are interrupted by other requests, the status of work on behalf of that thread is kept track of until the work is completed.


    This article was originally published in forum thread: ARK - Optimization Still Possible? started by Dugchugger View original post