Best graphics settings for Ark: Survival Ascended: Improve FPS and performance

Fix your FPS here!

ark survival ascended beach graphics

It’s not surprising Ark: Survival Ascended is a demanding game to run on PC. Fortunately for you, I spent time investigating the best graphics settings and discovered a great fix for most ASA performance or FPS issues. Let’s get into it.

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Ark: Survival Ascended: How to fix FPS and performance issues

For starters, lowering the Resolution Scale setting is the best way to increase your frame rate in Ark: Survival Ascended. Just head over to your Video settings and look for the Resolution Scale slider.

A player hiding from a stegosaur in Ark: Survival Ascended
Optimized ASA graphics for performance. Screenshot by Dot Esports

Once you find your desired Resolution Scale setting number (mine is 57), the next thing you should do is set your Graphics Preset to Low. Don’t worry, if you follow my instructions, you’ll be able to have ASA run well and look decent.

What are the best video settings in Ark: Survival Ascended?

Screenshot of the in-game settings for Ark: Survival Ascended
Screenshot by Dot Esports

After all video settings are set to Low, make your settings just like the ones listed below:

  • Anti Aliasing: Epic
  • General Shadows: High
  • Global Illumination Quality: High
  • Foliage Quality: High
  • Disable Max Frame Rate

Increasing the settings above will keep your game looking fairly good but won’t negatively impact your performance that much. If you still need a bit more performance, continue to tweak your Resolution Scale or some of the settings above.

A player staring at some dilophasaurs in Ark: Survival Ascended
Example of the above settings in-game. Screenshot by Dot Esports

We’re almost doneā€”just a few more graphics tweaks and you’ll have Ark: Survival Ascended running like a dream!

The final step is to enter the RTX tab in your General settings. There, enable NVIDIA DLSS, but disable Super Resolution. Personally, I didn’t like how Super Resolution affected my game, but feel free to try it out and see what you think.

Improve FPS by removing clouds in Ark: Survival Ascended

Removing clouds in Ark: Survival Ascended will give you a pretty significant FPS boost. You can remove clouds in ASA by hitting “~” to open the console and enter “r.volumetriccloud 0”.

This command consistently increased my FPS by around 10! However, it does remove some of the beautiful visuals when it comes to water reflections and lighting. You can add the clouds back by entering “r.volumetriccloud 1”.

Other ways to improve FPS and performance in Ark: Survival Ascended

If none of the above is doing much to improve your frame rate or performance in Ark: Survival Ascended, here are a few more settings you can apply in the Video settings for your game:

  • Motion Blur: OFF
  • Light Bloom: OFF
  • Light Shafts: OFF
  • Low-Light Enhancement: OFF
  • Enable Foliage & Fluid Interaction: OFF
  • Enable Footstep Particles: OFF
  • Enable Footstep Decals: ON
Tip:

While it’s not ideal, you can try running your game in Windowed mode rather than Fullscreen mode. You won’t have as much space devoted to the game, true, but it could be the difference that makes your game run well.

Well, that’s all there is to it! This strategy will act as a quick fix for those who are really struggling to run Ark: Survival Ascended at an acceptable frame rate.

If your FPS is still struggling, do not despair. I’m sure there will be helpful performance updates and mods that release in the near future.

System requirements for Ark: Survival Ascended

Ark: Survival Ascended is exclusive to PC due to issues with its console versions.But, like any other game, Ark: Survival Ascended has minimum and recommended system requirements. The former are necessary for the game to run, while the latter allows it to run with optimal graphical fidelity and smoothness:

Minimum RequirementsRecommended Requirements
CPUIntel Core i7 6800K/AMD Ryzen 5 2600XIntel Core i5 10600K/AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
Memory16 GB32 GB
GPUNvidia GeForce 1080/AMD Radeon RX 5600Nvidia RTX 3080/AMD Radeon RX 6800
Author
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Joe Greene
Joe Greene is currently the SEO Manager for the prestigious Dot Esports. If Joe isn't playing Bloons Tower Defense 6, he's probably thinking about playing it. With a background in writing, music and coding, Joe can really do it all!
Author
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Cade Davie
Proud husband and cat dad, Cade has been writing about games for more than five years and playing them for almost three decades. While he'll happily play everything he can get his hands on, he's partial to games released by Airship Syndicate, FromSoftware, and Giant Squid.