ARK Performance – How To Improve

Boost Your ARK: Survival Evolved Performance

FPS drops and sudden crashes can turn a good ARK: Survival Evolved session into a frustrating one. Whether you’re taming dinosaurs or hauling resources across the map, the last thing you want is a hitch in the action. Most of these issues come down to your PC’s own graphics settings and launch options, not your server. In this Nitrado guide, we’ll show you how to adjust your ARK: Survival Evolved client for better performance, from general Windows tips to in-game graphics settings and Steam launch parameters.

General Performance Tips for Your PC

Before touching any in-game settings, a few general PC habits make a real difference to how ARK: Survival Evolved runs:

• Close background programs: Fewer applications running at once means more CPU and RAM available for the game itself.
• Skip defragmenting an SSD: Defragmenting a traditional hard drive can improve performance, but doing this on an SSD can cause drive damage instead.
• Install ARK on an SSD: An SSD reads and writes data far faster than a standard hard drive, which shortens load times and reduces stutter.
• Keep your CPU cores active: Windows can park idle CPU cores to save power, which can hold back your frame rate during demanding scenes. Adjusting your power plan’s processor settings, or using a dedicated core-unparking utility, keeps every core available to the game.

Graphics Settings for ARK: Survival Evolved

ARK: Survival Evolved’s Options menu, under the Graphics tab, controls dozens of individual settings. Turning down a handful of the most demanding ones is usually enough to see a real difference without making the game look flat.

• View Distance: Controls how far the game renders terrain and objects. Set it to Low or Medium rather than High or Epic to reduce the load on your GPU.
• General Shadows and Terrain Shadows: Control shadow quality for characters, foliage, and the terrain itself. Low to Medium keeps most of the visual detail while cutting the rendering cost.
• Anti-Aliasing: Smooths jagged edges on models and terrain. Low to Medium is a reasonable middle ground between sharpness and frame rate.
• Post Processing: Handles effects like depth of field and lens flare. Low to Medium removes most of the overhead these effects add.
• Ground Clutter Density and Ground Clutter Distance: Control how much grass, rocks, and small floor detail render around you. Lowering both sliders reduces the number of objects your GPU has to draw.
• Motion Blur: Adds a blur effect to fast camera movement at a real cost to frame rate. Turning it off is one of the simplest performance gains available.
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Distance Field Ambient Occlusion: Add extra shadowing around objects to make scenes look more three-dimensional. The client itself labels Distance Field Ambient Occlusion as “Expensive,” and turning both off frees up GPU headroom.
• Sky Quality: Controls the detail of clouds and weather effects. Lowering this slider reduces the rendering cost of the sky itself.

Beyond this list, the menu includes several more granular Quality-labeled dropdowns for textures, materials, and effects. Moving any of them from Epic toward Low further reduces the load on your GPU, at the cost of some visual fidelity.

Steam Launch Options for ARK: Survival Evolved

If you play ARK: Survival Evolved through Steam, you can add launch parameters that change how the game starts up. These steps don’t apply if you play through another launcher.

1. Open Steam and go to your Library.
2. Right-click ARK: Survival Evolved and select Properties.
3. On the General tab, enter your parameters into the Launch Options field.
4. Close the Properties window to save your changes.

Important: Skip the -d3d12 parameter. ARK: Survival Evolved’s engine no longer includes the DX12 rendering module it needs, so this flag crashes the client at startup instead of improving performance.

A few parameters that are still safe to use, on their own or combined:

• -d3d11: Runs the game on DirectX 11, the client’s default rendering path, and is the safest choice for most PCs.
• -d3d10 and -sm4: Run the game on DirectX 10 with a hybrid DX10/DX11 shader model, which can help on lower-end hardware.
• -nomansky: Disables the sky, cloud, and weather effects.
• -useallavailablecores: Lets the game use every available CPU core instead of a limited subset.

More Ways to Boost Performance

Adjust NVIDIA Control Panel Settings

If you use an NVIDIA graphics card, open the NVIDIA Control Panel, go to Adjust Image Settings with Preview, select Use My Preference Emphasizing, and move the slider toward Performance. This tells your graphics card to prioritize frame rate over visual quality across every game, including ARK: Survival Evolved.

Lower Your In-Game Render Distance

The console command r.ViewDistanceScale adjusts how far the game renders objects like rocks, grass, and trees, on a scale down to a minimum of 0.1. Lowering the value reduces how much your GPU has to draw at once, which can help during CPU and GPU-heavy moments like large tribe battles.

Tame Smoother, Survive Longer

With your graphics settings dialed in and a working set of Steam launch options in place, ARK: Survival Evolved should run smoother on your own PC. Skip the old -d3d12 parameter, keep an eye on your GPU-heavy settings, and adjust further if your hardware has room to spare. Now get back out there and put those extra frames to work! 🦖