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Engine Overhaul and Texture Optimizations


spankyquest

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Engine Overhaul and Texture Optimizations

Currently, ARK takes up 160GB of data on my hard drive. If I want to ask a friend to try our ARK for the first time with me, I'll have to convince them to sacrifice a humongous portion of their drive just to try it out, sit through 1-3 hours of download time, knowing full well that most of that space is texture maps that will never get utilized. This isn't an easy sell, especially in a competitive environment like Steam.
What if you could install a smaller version of the game with smaller more optimized textures and not sacrifice space, and optionally install Hi-Res textures later if you want them. Most people I know play with textures set to Medium anyway, not Epic. And those that have Epic, would be hard pressed to spot the difference when lowering them slightly.

UE4.5.x is starting to show its age. It's inability to do dynamic tessellation because of a lack of dx12/ogl3/vulkan support means that duplicated objects have a higher performance hit than they would otherwise. I see that WildCard intended to move forward to a modern engine in the past, as these options are available in the PC version settings, but a focus on new content over optimization and bugfixing has left this movement halted. (not to say they haven't done solid bugfixing, they've patched some major issues and I applaud the dev team's hard work) But hardware utilization is particularly poor on systems that have multiple gpus, systems like gaming laptops that have both on-die gpus and dedicated, that could add a huge influx of players if they could just play the game at decent framerates. This would open the game up to lower tier gaming rigs and improve the performance on consoles.  Moving to a modern version of UE may not be easy, but it might be worth investing in. The experience of having the game crash while you're in the middle of a dino tame or a high stress versus-encounter leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth and is extremely common. During a transition, you might notice bugs you may never have before had you not had to comb over your code. Shadows popping in and out of existence, shaders being improperly configured. (Why can I see my dinos wings in the ocean reflection shader when I'm flying up high?)  Etc.

Thanks for this wonderful game, and I hope to see you all out in ARK. Hopefully in dx12 or Vulkan.

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Optimization is not a binary. They don't either do it or not do it. It's an ongoing process with many steps. They've taken many of those steps already. This is why I was able to run the game at 50 FPS instead of 25 on my super old CPU and GPU many moons ago.

The great mass of optimizations has likely already been done. Don't hold your breath expecting them to lower the system requirements much more.

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On 8/26/2020 at 4:57 PM, Oldster said:

Optimization is not a binary. They don't either do it or not do it. It's an ongoing process with many steps. They've taken many of those steps already. This is why I was able to run the game at 50 FPS instead of 25 on my super old CPU and GPU many moons ago.

The great mass of optimizations has likely already been done. Don't hold your breath expecting them to lower the system requirements much more.

Im running MSI 270 Gaming Pro, i7 7700, 32GB RAM, 2 1TB SSDs,, 2 GTX 1080s and a 150Mbps ISP.  Im not looking for retro fitting the game to suit a 486.

 

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20 hours ago, spankyquest said:

It's just weird to me that a game with an engine from 2015 is still struggling to cap 1080p60 medium-settings on mid-tier hardware in 2019.

If it's that difficult to optimize and move it toward a more modern version of the engine, then that's a sign that you're not using your code-smells, and it probably needed refactorization in the first place. 

The engine is starting to show it's age. Doesn't mean that they don't have a good reason to optimize the game. UE4.5x is not a bad game engine by any means. But Wildcard clearly does not want to optimize their game.
Still doesn't give them the excuse to lie and claim that they cannot update the game engine regardless. It's Unreal Engine for God's sake, a game engine designed for compatibility within itself. Epic Games may be a terrible company but at least they know a good game engine.
Back in Early Access when PC was the only platform for the game, they were putting SO much effort into the game, both content and optimization. Sure, the optimization is FAR better now than it was on day one, but it is still absolutely terrible especially for the level of hardware most people are packing nowadays (Lots of people run RTX gpus and those won't even run on ARK without giving you a bluescreen). Now in full release they don't give a crap about optimization.
GTX 1080Ti. i7 8700k at 4.8 GHz. 32GB of RAM, 1440p resolution at like 90 percent resolution scaling on the Epic settings preset, what FPS do I get... *drumroll* ...45FPS! On a graphics card that can easily push well over 120FPS in this resolution and easily compete against high end cards of the current generation!
Lowering or turning off shadows alone doubles or even triples my FPS in some cases.

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It's just weird to me that a game with an engine from 2015 is still struggling to cap 1080p60 medium-settings on mid-tier hardware in 2019.

If it's that difficult to optimize and move it toward a more modern version of the engine, then that's a sign that you're not using your code-smells, and it probably needed refactorization in the first place. 

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I can absolutely 100 percent agree with this. Optimization is absolute key for a game's lifespan. You pointed out every problem with ARK's current engine.
I play on a GTX 1080 Ti, a graphics card designed to push maximum graphics in 1440p or sometimes 4k resolution. Seeing that I get 45 FPS average on the highest settings (in 1440p, not even maximum resolution scaling on the epic preset) definitely is a sign that Wildcard needs to seriously update the engine used on ARK; it wouldn't be that hard. 45 FPS on a GTX 1080Ti (and continuous crashes on RTX graphics cards) is absolutely unacceptable. I play Battlefield 5, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Rust as well, all of which run well over 100 FPS in 1440p on max settings or close to it (No DXR enabled on BF5) and are incredibly demanding, but actually well optimized.
After all, Unreal Engine is designed to be forwards and backwards compatible with itself. Wildcard makes a claim that they cannot update their game engine though, which is a blatant lie. Like seriously, PUT SOME EFFORT INTO YOUR GAME. Why can't they invest as much into making ARK as enjoyable and playable as possible? Due to UE4's design, it would be easy for them to update to the latest version. After all, the UE4 devs said something about any customization being made to the engine could be back ported with ease due to it's design, but WC is lying through their teeth, saying their version on UE4 is "highly customized" and they cannot update it due to that reason.
The worst example of Wildcard using the engine has to be crowned to ARK on Windows 10. It's pretty much just a shell now of what it was originally going to be, due to it's development being abandoned and only slopped through to keep it's compatibility with the now almost unplayable console versions of the game. Like for example! Ark on Windows 10 not rendering any rocks and trees outside of render distance! Or just wiping your single-player saves randomly! The same problems exist on consoles as well and all the graphical and engine problems that exist on PC exist on console as well and are multiplied by tenfold.
As much as I like their game, I REALLY do question what Studio Wildcard does in their offtime and I also question what kind of a fuss goes on in their place. Or if their updates even have testers for the game at all. 
They should hire me as a bug tester, because I seem to be pretty good at finding every last little problem with a game, whether it be a bug, a glitch, or a graphical problem.
Another problem with ARK is it's generally and blatantly terrible optimization. If they were able to push DirectX12 support and a newer version of Unreal Engine, or adding Vulkan support would help soooo much with the performance of the game. And they can't complain about having to re-work all the assets. It IS Unreal Engine after all. So I agree. This absolutely needs to happen. It's not a suggestion, this is something that NEEDS to happen to benefit ALL versions of the game.
On the topic of DXR, ARK was supposed to have DXR, but I don't see that happening. It would likely be an unnecessary feature and wouldn't be able to happen regardless, as DXR needs DirectX12, and ARK runs DirectX11 with, as mentioned, ARK also uses a very early version of Unreal Engine 4. It's basically a prototype version of the engine.

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