BigFatBoy Posted March 11, 2019 Share Posted March 11, 2019 Hello! We (my fiancee and I) bought Ark. We just love survival games and Ark sounds like a lot of fun. We run Ark, set everything to epic (in graphics settings) and start a new game. Please tell me, we have just missed something and this game doesn't look like in a screenshot? Where is anti-aliasing? Everything is jagged, not smooth. AFAIK Ark is written in Unreal Engine, isn't it? It cannot look so bad (it's not Unity :P and even in Unity you can get a better quality). It does look like that and it's normal, nothing missed on our side? I'll add that we are playing on 1080p resoultion. We get only 30-40 FPS on our native resolution (1440p), which is weird looking at our rigs (mine i7 7700k, 64 GB RAM, 1080Ti and my fiancee's i7 9700k, 16 GB RAM and 2070). I have tested another game written in UE4 and at 1080p it looks definitely sharper than Ark. I made even a comparision, but it's competition for Ark, so I won't upload it. :P The screenshot: https://mwgcdn.net/upload/attachments/6/62/626/3cb3f984-4426-11e9-ba3c-0025907ca59f/20190311163624_1.jpg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swordguy Posted March 11, 2019 Share Posted March 11, 2019 I've always noticed that in DX10 mode ARK looks sharp AF, but not nearly as photo realistic. It likely comes down to tessellation, Ambient Occlusion, and all the post processing effects being done that are overlapping one another. There's also Resolution Scale in the settings that can sharpen or blur what you are seeing, but i can't recall if epic settings max the Resolution Scale out or not, as I run custom settings in 4K. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkMartin Posted March 11, 2019 Share Posted March 11, 2019 I have the solution for you: Resolution scale. 90% of the time goes unnoticed by the newbies, since it's a bar. Resolution scale is the most important graphical setting in ark besides resolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigFatBoy Posted March 11, 2019 Author Share Posted March 11, 2019 1 hour ago, MarkMartin said: I have the solution for you: Resolution scale. 90% of the time goes unnoticed by the newbies, since it's a bar. Resolution scale is the most important graphical setting in ark besides resolution. Unfortunately it's maxed out. It seems that I should ask question differently. If you look on the screenshot, do you see the same graphics quality you see in Ark everyday or it does look better on your end? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Woodsman Posted March 11, 2019 Share Posted March 11, 2019 it could be your monitor im using a 42 inch tv and noticed text is a little burry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkMartin Posted March 12, 2019 Share Posted March 12, 2019 18 hours ago, BigFatBoy said: Unfortunately it's maxed out. It seems that I should ask question differently. If you look on the screenshot, do you see the same graphics quality you see in Ark everyday or it does look better on your end? What screenshot man Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigFatBoy Posted March 13, 2019 Author Share Posted March 13, 2019 The link is in the first post. :P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CCRogerWilco Posted March 13, 2019 Share Posted March 13, 2019 THat's sort of how my game looks on Epic as well. I get around 30 fps on a GTX 980. I have bloom turned off. I am speculating, but I think there are a few things that are limiting ARK: * They don't have a skill, experience and budget of a AAA developer. * With less skill the game is less optimized * With less budget the game world is not as detailed and diverse. * The models of things vary in detail. Some things seem to be from some asset store, others like the dino's are developed in house and of higher quality. * The quality of things have improved as they got more experienced. Their oldest dinos in the Beta were quite a bit less polished, but most of them have now gotten an update in the various dino TLC patches. A few more might follow. * ARK is rendering a big world. This means that the number of polygons it can afford to spend on each object are limited compared to a more closed boxed in world. * ARK spends quite a bit of it's CPU resources on animating the "ecosystem", pooping and similar things. In that sense it's more like SimCity than a typical FPS, for which UE4 was built. * ARK has built some quite large worlds with a relatively small team, and thus not a lot of time has been spent on each little part of it. Therefore any comparison to a game like Red Dead Redemption II or even GTA V is going to look a bit plain and undetailed. * ARK was developed on a really early version of the UE4, thus limiting what they could do with it. My point is, that the things that are there mostly look good, but you're missing the things that are not there, the details and clutter that make a world look more real. Adding those on the scale of an ARK world is something only very few studios have the resources to pull off. Wildcard probably could have done better, had they known up front how much they would sell, but for a new studio that's really hard to get money to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigFatBoy Posted March 13, 2019 Author Share Posted March 13, 2019 All those things are not irreplacable. You can easily replace textures, LODs and even whole models (but shape must remain the same, due to collision detection, otherwise it would be time consuming). I don't believe that after such a success they still have no money for small artistic refresh. For example character texture is gross! Those shadows on back... And it's not a big investment I think to change (fix?) it. Or maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it, I don't know. I would say that due to optimization they needed to sacrifice quality, but... there is one game we have played right before Ark (there have been a free weekend recently and sale of Ark and the second game, we bought both :D). It is written in UE4, survival genre with rich world full of humans, creatures etc. Same level of complexity in my opinion. And it looks 10x better. Smoothed edges, proper (nice looking!) LODs etc. A good looking graphics quality is achievable in UE4. But I'm getting used to the quality of Ark, and trying not to notice this pixelated environment. The game (mechanics) etc. is pretty decent, but it lacks in terms of visual part (character's animations are awful too :P). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anarki Posted March 13, 2019 Share Posted March 13, 2019 ARK is renowned for being resource hungry and an FPS killer. Your rig seems up for it but I think you have some settings not correctly applied as my game looks a lot smoother (granted I play in 4k) but still, I think you should look through your graphics settings and review how you have it setup. Im on an i7, 32gb RAM, 1080ti and depending on the map, my FPS can fluctuate a lot so I have to change settings for each map - annoyingly. Have a search on here or on pcgamer for ideal settings as that is what I have used in the past. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeHammer Posted March 13, 2019 Share Posted March 13, 2019 ARK is not well optimized graphically. However, I've just recently upgraded from 5 year old tech, and can run at the epic settings now, so to me it looks great. But I think its fair to say this game has way more redeeming qualities, so even if the graphics are a bit of a let down, its still an amazing game to play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CCRogerWilco Posted March 13, 2019 Share Posted March 13, 2019 3 hours ago, BigFatBoy said: All those things are not irreplacable. You can easily replace textures, LODs and even whole models (but shape must remain the same, due to collision detection, otherwise it would be time consuming). I don't believe that after such a success they still have no money for small artistic refresh. For example character texture is gross! Those shadows on back... And it's not a big investment I think to change (fix?) it. Or maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it, I don't know. I would say that due to optimization they needed to sacrifice quality, but... there is one game we have played right before Ark (there have been a free weekend recently and sale of Ark and the second game, we bought both :D). It is written in UE4, survival genre with rich world full of humans, creatures etc. Same level of complexity in my opinion. And it looks 10x better. Smoothed edges, proper (nice looking!) LODs etc. A good looking graphics quality is achievable in UE4. But I'm getting used to the quality of Ark, and trying not to notice this pixelated environment. The game (mechanics) etc. is pretty decent, but it lacks in terms of visual part (character's animations are awful too :P). They have done some artistic refresh, the so-called "Dino TLC". I agree that quite a few textures are not my taste and some are not very detailed. I've modded quite a few things. There are certainly UE4 games that look better. As I said, they started on a very early version of the UE4, which meant they have put a lot of custom stuff in that now has better solutions in the standard UE4, which they seem to have been struggling to adapt into their code. I don't see any pixelation that you're talking about, in your screenshot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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