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Hardware Update To Get The Best From Ark


H0mith

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I have recently purchased an RTX 3090 (as an upgrade from an RTX 2080ti) graphics card with the intention to improve my experience play Ark (love the game!). Coupled with this is an Intel 7700k CPU at 5Ghz. My monitor is 2560 x 1440 @ 150Hz. Really happy with the GPU so far, however I have a question on base and scenery render times.

I have used the NVIDIA GeForce Experience tool to set my graphics optimization and on single player this looks absolutely amazing. A real credit to the team for such wonderful Ark experience. I have uploaded my NVIDIA GeForce Experience settings to this ticket for your review.

The question I have is regarding the base and scenery load times on the public servers. What I am finding is to load mine and others bases in takes considerable time (in excess of 40 - 70 sec). And, when you go out of render and back into render of the bases this occurs again with the same render times. My in in game FPS is around 40 - 60 FPS which is quite reasonable I feel and quite playable.

In my quest to get the best experience from Ark (as I love this game so much indeed) I am prepared to go and upgrade my CPU and motherboard. I have been contemplating going the Intel 10900K route with a suitable motherboard. As this will be rather an expensive upgrade (considering just upgrading to the RTX 3090 just for Ark) I wanted to understand from your perspective if an upgrade to my CPU compute will improve my rendering speeds. If this is what I need to do to get the best from Ark I am more than happy to do so.


Cheers and have a great day

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Ok so first I'd say just do a once over of your settings (just to make sure they're all set appropriately) geforce experience is good but sometimes you might wanna customize it for your personal preferences (like maybe turning up draw distance if you can)

 

Apart from that personally I doubt you'll see much of a performance improvement from a CPU upgrade, especially not one that would make the price worth it. I believe what your seeing with regards to base loading is just how ark handles structures (if you follow the patch notes you'll have seen that recently they actually improved this loading) a server rather than single player will also be contributing to the slow loading as the information for the map can be loaded from your pc locally but bases built by players need to get it's information from the server.

Basically as a tl;dr I think your seeing it as good as it can get

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From what it sounds like and what you already have in your machine, Id say you might wanna take a look at your RAM set up, or quite possibly your storage solution.

If your on 8 MB of RAM, might wanna upgrade to 16......or maybe even 32 the way things have been going lately. >.> However if its only at 2666 htz or so, might wanna see if you can get something a bit faster.......don't break the bank on speed tho, 3200 should be just fine.
If you got some beefy ram already in place, or are not interested in messing with it, you really can't go wrong with looking over your storage solution......hard drives truly are a thing of the past with all the different SSD's currently available. But if you absolutely must stick with a hard drive due to cost issues, try and get a low capacity, but cheap SSD to run your OS and then use the hard drive to run the game.....just getting all the background processes off of the hard drive and freeing it up to dedicate its workload on just games alone, you will notice a difference of in game loading instances such as large bases or structures....... May not be as good as useing an SSD to run the game off of, but it will be noticeable.

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no offense but honestly i don't know how anyone can even run games on a system anymore with only 8gb of ram, most games want to eat up 4gb right off the bat, and ark? its not exception.  

16gb mem you'll find the game runs alot better, 32gb even better, expecially if your turning on all the graphical effects, maxing view distance, using high quality LOD. 

I have 2 machines here in my office, 1 with 16gb ram, 1 with 32gb ram, both with decent video cards, and i can defiantly see a improvement in play between the 16gb and 32gb machine.

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4 hours ago, H0mith said:

Good Evening people,

I have 32GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM and all my storage in the computer is M.2 NvME and SATA SSD. What I have discovered if I set the card to Dynamic Super Resolution to 4K rendering is quite a lot better.  I am putting this down to either CPU or Monitor upgrades now

Ark is not exactly optimised Your rig is not going to speed up rendering bases in ...

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So, the thing about bases taking 40-70 seconds to load in, and having to load in each time, has absolutely _nothing_, zero, zilch to do with your hardware specs. You could run eight RTX3080s and 200 billion megs of RAM and it would behave exactly the same. It is net code. There is nothing you can do about it locally. It happens because every time your machine wants to render in a base, it needs to do a little process for every structure in the area to make sure its actually there and wasn't destroyed. If you think of how copying a single 2gb file is faster than copying a thousand 2mb files, it is the same kind of deal. If your base (or any base you render in) has 1500 individual structures, that's 1500 little calculations your PC and server have to exchange information about. To make it so that the whole server doesn't hang for everybody else while you are loading stuff in, they have additional code that optimizes and further slows down the loading process to avoid bottlenecking. It is not a performance issue, it is by design. Ark is huge. 

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To be exact, part of the loading time is your local computer drawing the textures on your monitor, and part of it is what I described. You are past the point of diminishing returns, though. You can improve it to a certain point until the net code is the only bottleneck, and even then you will experience bases loading in one piece at a time and not all at once, seamlessly. 

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If you wanna spend cash to improve the experience, you're far better off to build and run your own server in your house. As others have mentioned, the problem lies in the time it takes for the information to get from the server to your machine.

Being physically close to the server allows those large bases to render in faster, although it isn't perfect. Even with a local server, if I come ripping into my base at full speed on a Tropeo, it still takes a few seconds for everything to render.

You will, of course, need quite a few (preferably local) friends who want to play on your server.

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On 10/26/2020 at 1:14 PM, wizard03 said:

From what it sounds like and what you already have in your machine, Id say you might wanna take a look at your RAM set up, or quite possibly your storage solution.

If your on 8 MB of RAM, might wanna upgrade to 16......or maybe even 32 the way things have been going lately. >.> However if its only at 2666 htz or so, might wanna see if you can get something a bit faster.......don't break the bank on speed tho, 3200 should be just fine.
If you got some beefy ram already in place, or are not interested in messing with it, you really can't go wrong with looking over your storage solution......hard drives truly are a thing of the past with all the different SSD's currently available. But if you absolutely must stick with a hard drive due to cost issues, try and get a low capacity, but cheap SSD to run your OS and then use the hard drive to run the game.....just getting all the background processes off of the hard drive and freeing it up to dedicate its workload on just games alone, you will notice a difference of in game loading instances such as large bases or structures....... May not be as good as useing an SSD to run the game off of, but it will be noticeable.

Speed of the ram makes minimal difference on performance. Depending on game going from 2133 mhz to 3200 mhz you will get around 1 fps. With luck, 3 fps.

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Hwdy 

What you are experiencing is render lag, or more accurately data transferred from server to you client lag. 

Arks network and servers are not the most optimised and as it dosn't use local cache data can take a while to load and render in. 

See how many time people get stuck in bases or fall through the world 

Even if you have a top tier Hardware spec pc the load and render times with be the same 

I have tested ark over 25Mbs 50Mbs and 100Mbs fibre lines (1:1 ratio) and there is no discernible difference in load times ( you result my variy with your ISP) 

This in one cheap out way to let more people with different specs play online 

Think back to TF2, BF2, CS, HL days when we all had potatoes

Even though with current recommendation with the new GPUs out a new CPU will provide a benefit for you FPS and responce time. 

Dedi server and self hosting is the only way to have a snappy load/render time 

Sng-player will always look better as it use local (your PC) as the resources pool 

 

Hope that helps 

 

 

 

  

 

 

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Thanks everyone for the valued insight - far more information received here than was received from a support ticket raised, I am on a 1 Gbps internet connection and as you have suggested, doesn't make a difference. What I am seeing however is with a RTX 3090 playing at 1440 is challenging and base render times are very poor. I went out and purchased a 3840 x 2160 monitor today that runs at 144Hz and what I have noticed it made a very noticeable improvement. It seems that running at 4K with a RTX 3090 really hits the sweet spot.

I then swapped out the RTX 3090 with a 2080 Ti OC using the same 3840 x 2160 monitor and framerates and render were poor. I swapped out the monitor and plugged in a 1440 monitor and framerates were better, render times improved.

Very odd results

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13 hours ago, 7RobFrost said:

Hwdy 

What you are experiencing is render lag, or more accurately data transferred from server to you client lag. 

Arks network and servers are not the most optimised and as it dosn't use local cache data can take a while to load and render in. 

See how many time people get stuck in bases or fall through the world 

Even if you have a top tier Hardware spec pc the load and render times with be the same 

I have tested ark over 25Mbs 50Mbs and 100Mbs fibre lines (1:1 ratio) and there is no discernible difference in load times ( you result my variy with your ISP) 

This in one cheap out way to let more people with different specs play online 

Think back to TF2, BF2, CS, HL days when we all had potatoes

Even though with current recommendation with the new GPUs out a new CPU will provide a benefit for you FPS and responce time. 

Dedi server and self hosting is the only way to have a snappy load/render time 

Sng-player will always look better as it use local (your PC) as the resources pool 

 

Hope that helps 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Yep, there is no difference of loading times on different network spped unless you are using 56k modem. As there is max data server or client will send per second. 

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Hwdy 

In regards to screen size, resolution and refresh rate there is a sweet spot 

Running a card at 80 hrz and the screen at 40Hzr will also look odd as you are skipping frames

 Nvidia for a while now has been trying to smooth it out (Gsync) one example, but it can also result in input out put lag de-sync

Good way to look at it always have the screen faster then the card but 10-30 FPS ( this doesnt apply to FPS games ) for it to look the smoothest

Some time lower card perform better due to native resolution

ie my wife's 2060Super and 1080P vastly out performs mt 2080 ti (27" screens ) 

but at 1440 it swings around in some case the card with try to compensate for low resolutions with cause extra work for it and weirdness happens 

Hope that helps 

  

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