How to fix ARK Survival Ascended (ASA) performance issues

The long-awaited ARK Survival Ascended gives the dinosaur survival game an Unreal Engine 5 treatment. Unfortunately, performance hasn't matched expectations.

That said, you can improve performance for ARK Survival Ascended on PC with a few settings changes. Here is how to fix performance in ARK Survival Ascended.

How to improve ARK Survival Ascended (ASA) performance

The first thing to do is verify your graphics drivers is up-to-date. ARK: Survival Ascended is a demanding game, and if your drivers aren't updated, you'll encounter more issues. Here is where you can check for updates:

• Nvidia
• AMD
• Intel

Next, set your Graphical Presets to low to turn all settings to low. From here, you can adjust specific settings to improve your performance and FPS. ARK: Survival Ascended has insane requirements and doesn't seem to be optimized well, so issues are expected until patches are pushed out. Here are the settings for improved PC performance in ARK Survival Ascended.

• Anti-Aliasing - Epic
• General Shadows - High
• Global Illumination - High
• Foliage Quality - High
• Disable Super Resolution

Related: Differences Between ARK Survival Ascended (ASA) and ARK Survival Evolved

With the settings above, I get decent performance on my gaming laptop, which runs with the specifications below. The game still looks good, and I only experience the occasional stutter. Depending on your PC's specifications, you may need to tweak the settings above, but these are typically what gives you the biggest difference in performance.

• Processor: Intel 12th Generation Core i9
• Memory: 16 GB
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
• Storage: SSD

Additional performance fixes for ARK Survival Ascended (ASA)

• Disable Motion Blur:
  • Motion Blur is more down to preference, but I find it better to disable this feature. But you do get a slight boost to frames with it turned off.
• Disable Frame Rate Max:
  • You can manually set your FPS in the settings, or disable it. Turning this feature off may hurt more than help, but it prevents your PC from trying to reach frames higher than it can.

ARK Survival Ascended (ASA) system requirements

For more information on ARK: Survival Ascended, check out How many GB is ARK Survival Ascended? – Total download size (GB) and How to craft in ARK Survival Ascended on Pro Game Guides.