Studio Wildcard’s Ark: Survival Ascended launched on PC shortly after its gameplay debuted at the Xbox Partner Preview showcase. Despite some positive reception to the improvements, the Unreal Engine 5 remake suffered, from extensive performance issues to crashes. Even those with high-end cards like a GeForce RTX 4090 were facing problems.
The developer acknowledged this and released an update to improve client-side performance. “Working from anecdotal feedback and hard data provided by players, we deployed a new client-side update released tonight that will improve your game’s frame rate.” Along with various optimizations, it also provides “better settings” for Graphics Quality mode.
The developer also deployed other improvements to client performance through the weekend and reduced stuttering and hitching by generating a Pipeline State Object Cache. There’s still work to be done, with the team dealing with “never-before-seen crashes since the game went live.” “Honestly, the floodgates had opened, and at one point, servers were coming down faster than we could put them online! Thankfully, as of our latest server-side build, we’ve managed to get the servers in a much more stable state, eliminating over 95% of server crashes.”
The engineering team will work on server performance issues, while a Public Test Realm branch is coming later this week to try out some “riskier optimizations” before deploying them to the live game. Stay tuned for more details, especially with the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 versions still coming in November.