stargatedalek Posted October 4, 2018 Share Posted October 4, 2018 I currently have a Radeon RX480, it's a good card, and by all accounts it should be able to run ARK very well. The problem is this game has a lot of NVidia specific optimizations. I'm considering purchasing a second card. What card(s) are truly able to give a smooth ARK experience? Not just in terms of FPS but also stutter (arguably more important). Follow-up question, does performance on private servers improve significantly over single player? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ishootpaint Posted October 4, 2018 Share Posted October 4, 2018 Im running a EVGA SC edition 1070 and it runs everything but aberration 60+ fps solid on all epic settings. Aberration is like 35-55 pending on the zone. Another important aspect is the CPU your using. Make sure you GPU is indeed the bottleneck before buying a new one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fallenparrot Posted October 4, 2018 Share Posted October 4, 2018 I’m using a gtx 970 and it runs everything pretty well. I definitely want to upgrade though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sphere Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 I have a GTX 1060 six gig. And GTX 1080 SLI. If you are playing at a monitor resolution of 1080p, a single GTX 1060 six gig will do just fine, in fact I hear from friends a GTX 1050 Ti will do just fine. If you are playing at a monitor resolution of 1440p, a single GTX 1080 will do just fine, or you could try a GTX 1070 Ti. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robertpp Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 using 1080ti and its awesome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William5456 Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 Based on my experience, 1070Ti should be enough and also you need 32GB RAM !! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lewiatan Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 As far as I know there is none single GPU on this planet that can run ARK on epic settings 1080p in >=60 fps all the time. Maybe new RTX cards will be able to handle this unoptimised game Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anarki Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 2 hours ago, Lewiatan said: As far as I know there is none single GPU on this planet that can run ARK on epic settings 1080p in >=60 fps all the time. Maybe new RTX cards will be able to handle this unoptimised game My 1080ti with a 4790k i7 runs 4k at 55-60fps across Center and Island Maps with no issues (Using a GSync predator monitor). The only issues I have is with Aberration where I drop it to 1440p so I can continue hitting a steady close to 60fps. There are a number of things which help the smoothness of gameplay and its not just your GPU. Using a SSD and having the right RAM types makes a big difference too. Having a cheap motherboard because you spent too much on a GPU will also slow performance of your rig. For ARK, they have Nvidia experience I believe so having a GSync monitor allows you to completely turn of Anti-liasing as the monitor removes screen tearing and this frees up the GPU allowing a slight increase in FPS. There are also a number of other issues i.e. other applications you are running in the back ground. Essentially though, an NVidia 1080 or above will provide a very smooth game play and just alter some settings to allow you to hit 60fps when you want (shadows are the biggest hit in my opinion). Don't go with SLi or anything like that as ARK is not designed for multi GPU hence why I got rid of my AMD Radeon R9 295x2 as essentially is was running as a 290. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stargatedalek Posted October 5, 2018 Author Share Posted October 5, 2018 Thanks for the advice everyone. In out of the way areas I can get 60fps, but anywhere even vaguely busy with creatures has horrible stutter with frequent sudden drops into the 20's or lower. This is with resolution scale at about 75% and most settings on high and medium. Changing settings lower does not improve performance. I would like to be able to achieve full or near full resolution scale without the sudden performance drops, but other settings like shadows aren't super important. Task Manager shows GPU hovering between 90% and 100%, whereas CPU is at around 35% to 40% and memory sticks in the low 70's. I don't know how accurate of a read-out task manager is, but it seems like GPU is my bottleneck (for ARK anyway). Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB No SSD, I assume I should try that before committing to a new GPU? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthaNyan Posted October 5, 2018 Share Posted October 5, 2018 1 hour ago, stargatedalek said: No SSD, I assume I should try that before committing to a new GPU? yup. Stutters are usually either a (insufficient)RAM or HDD(speed) problem, or both. Switching to faster drive (SSD or M2) should vastly improve in-game loading speed and reduce amount of stutters you get. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lewiatan Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 On 10/5/2018 at 11:44 AM, Anarki said: My 1080ti with a 4790k i7 runs 4k at 55-60fps across Center and Island Maps with no issues (Using a GSync predator monitor). The only issues I have is with Aberration where I drop it to 1440p so I can continue hitting a steady close to 60fps. There are a number of things which help the smoothness of gameplay and its not just your GPU. Using a SSD and having the right RAM types makes a big difference too. Having a cheap motherboard because you spent too much on a GPU will also slow performance of your rig. For ARK, they have Nvidia experience I believe so having a GSync monitor allows you to completely turn of Anti-liasing as the monitor removes screen tearing and this frees up the GPU allowing a slight increase in FPS. There are also a number of other issues i.e. other applications you are running in the back ground. Essentially though, an NVidia 1080 or above will provide a very smooth game play and just alter some settings to allow you to hit 60fps when you want (shadows are the biggest hit in my opinion). Don't go with SLi or anything like that as ARK is not designed for multi GPU hence why I got rid of my AMD Radeon R9 295x2 as essentially is was running as a 290. I have I7 6700k 4.0-4.4Ghz, 32 RAM DDR4 3000Mhz Hyperx Savage, MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X, motherboatd is also top gaming model from MSI. This is not unoptimised gaming pc build. The performance of the game varied depending on if I looked at tree line or a river. When I looked at tree line barerly 30fps in 1080p epic, when I turned to river I had 45-50 fps. The point is not to play around settings to hit 60+ fps,the game should have been optimised enough to not force you finding band aid solutions. I haven't changed anything in settings , I played vanilla ARK and performance was underwhelming to put it mildly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DirkInSA Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 On 10/4/2018 at 4:55 PM, stargatedalek said: I currently have a Radeon RX480, it's a good card, and by all accounts it should be able to run ARK very well. The problem is this game has a lot of NVidia specific optimizations. I'm considering purchasing a second card. What card(s) are truly able to give a smooth ARK experience? Not just in terms of FPS but also stutter (arguably more important). Follow-up question, does performance on private servers improve significantly over single player? I'm running a 4gig R9 380, which is older and worse than your card. I run on epic with reasonable FPS and do not get stutter, HOWEVER I have to force the game to DirectX 10 (-d3d10 -sm4) or it crashes within 5 minutes of startup. This is playing single player, local LAN server & online. I have an i5 CPU and no SSD, but do have 16gigs of RAM. Lastly I ain't tried abberation so can't comment there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anarki Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 On 10/5/2018 at 10:04 PM, DarthaNyan said: yup. Stutters are usually either a (insufficient)RAM or HDD(speed) problem, or both. Switching to faster drive (SSD or M2) should vastly improve in-game loading speed and reduce amount of stutters you get. SSDs in my opinion are very good but this mainly affects loading times as opposed to games running directly. There is a slight performance increase for games by having an SSD but generally unless its Arma 3 which is known to be a CPU killer, the GPU is where your FPS and performance is heavily relied upon. A lot of people install a smaller SSD for their windows installment only as this reduces load times but for gaming its not really the worth it for the cost against a HDD and its better to spend the extra on the GPU if you are looking to getting a high FPS and smooth gameplay. Thats just my opinion though and from my experience. Im sure there a platforms specialist here who can explain it in a lot more detail and justify what the best solution for you is who reads this post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthaNyan Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 4 hours ago, Anarki said: SSDs in my opinion are very good but this mainly affects loading times as opposed to games running directly. There is a slight performance increase for games by having an SSD but generally unless its Arma 3 which is known to be a CPU killer, the GPU is where your FPS and performance is heavily relied upon. A lot of people install a smaller SSD for their windows installment only as this reduces load times but for gaming its not really the worth it for the cost against a HDD and its better to spend the extra on the GPU if you are looking to getting a high FPS and smooth gameplay. Thats just my opinion though and from my experience. Im sure there a platforms specialist here who can explain it in a lot more detail and justify what the best solution for you is who reads this post. Lack of RAM when using a RAM-hungry application like ARK forces system to (ab)use page file more often which may lead to lagspikes/stutters within the game. Even more so if system is not located on a fast drive like SSD. Same applies game resources: map, meshes, textures and other stuff are loaded and unloaded from memory constantly so by having ARK installed on a slower drive will also greatly impact game's performance. GPU is important, no doubt about it. But neglecting other parts of the system is bound to result in performance bottlenecks elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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