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This game looks beautiful, but it has notoriously bad performance. It is by far the number one complaint in the forums. I am getting ~20fps on the lowest settings, with a GTX 780.

History has shown me that people usually find ways to disable the one or two settings that cause horrendous performance like this, but sifting through the forum posts, I haven't found anything yet. So, how can I improve my framerate?

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  • watching people stream this with sli 980s they also get drops. the game isnt 100% optimized yet, especially when you fly and the game loads in objects theres HUGE fps drops that will have to be patched out from their side. nothing you can do to fix that
    – r wank
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 8:29

2 Answers 2

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Aha! According to this post, the issue (for Nvidia cards at least) is that the NVidia driver thinks the game is a normal application, and is throttling the GPU as a result.

To disable the throttling:

  • Go into the NVidia Control Panel
  • Choose the Ark: Survival Evolved .exe file
  • Change the 'power management' setting from 'Adaptive' to 'Maximum Performance'

The majority of users report much better performance on Nvidia cards after this fix, but unfortunately I can't find anything similar for ATI cards. I do not have one to test with - maybe someone who does could mess around and report back here?

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    I did this and it caused non-stop video driver crashes while ARK was running. Which persisted after changing the settings back. It required a full reboot. Do this at your own risk.
    – Reaces
    Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 11:07
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This is a bit older of a question, but I wanted to provide another answer here in case someone else comes across it (like I did) with a similar issue.

I recently built a new Ryzen 7 2700, 16GB RAM, SSD, and GTX 1080 video card and even on minimum settings, everything turned off or as low as it can go, the game stuttered and was unplayable if I turned too quickly. I tried every setting in game and in the Nvidia control panel, and after any tweak of the in-game settings (Didn't matter what I changed, as long as I changed something), I would have about 30-60 seconds of smooth gameplay before it happened again. CPU utilization was always under 25% total, less than 70% per individual core, and memory utilization was <50% the entire time.

The only thing that worked for me was starting the game without BattlEye enabled, and disabling BattlEye on my private dedicated server. After that, I was able to turn all the settings up to max and the only time I have any kind of stutter is when I first log in and the assets are still loading.

Unfortunately, I know this won't fix the issue for everyone, especially if you play on an official server, but hopefully it'll help somebody else not go through the 3 days of hair pulling I did!

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