ARK: Survival Ascended Best Settings Guide For PC

Studio Wildcard and Grove Street Games’ latest action-adventure survival game, ARK: Survival Ascended, is now available, and we’ve put together the best PC settings for getting optimized performance on mid-end system specs.

Before we delve into the best settings for ARK: Survival Ascended on PC, make sure you’ve updated your GPU drivers and Windows to their latest respective versions. Additionally, disable or close any unnecessary background applications in order to reduce the CPU overhead as much as possible. The settings detailed ahead should provide a more optimized balance between graphics and frame rate compared to the presets available in-game.

ARK: Survival Ascended Best Settings

The settings below are there to serve as a broad starting point for further optimization based on your specific hardware specs. As a result, you may need to tweak some settings until you find a sweet spot based on your display’s refresh rate and the overall performance you seek.

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• Resolution: set as per the max resolution of your display or preference
• Window Mode: Fullscreen
• Resolution Scale: 100
• Advanced Graphics: Medium
• Anti Aliasing: Low
• View Distance: Low
• Textures: Epic (or High on GPUs with 6GB VRAM)
• Post Processing: Medium
• General Shadows: Medium
• Global Illumination Quality: High
• Effects Quality: Medium
• Foliage Quality: Medium
• Max Frame Rate: Disabled on a dislpay that supports VRR/G-Sync, else set to target frame rate
• Motion Blur: On
• Light Bloom: On
• Light Shafts: On
• Low-Light Enhancement: Off
• Enabled Foliage & Fluid Interaction: On
• Foliage Interaction Distance Multiplier: 1
• Foliage Interaction Distance Limit: 1
• Foliage Interaction Quantity Limit: 1
• Enable Footstep Particles: Off
• Enable Footstep Decals: Off

RTX

• Nvidia DLSS: Enable on supported GPUs
• Super Resolution: Quality
• Nvidia Reflex Low Latency: On on Nvidia GPUs

Steam Deck Optimized Settings

The settings below are for getting the best possible performance on the Steam Deck.

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• Resolution: 1280 x 800
• Window Mode: Fullscreen
• Resolution Scale: 100
• Advanced Graphics: Low
• Anti Aliasing: Low
• View Distance: Low
• Textures: High
• Post Processing: Low
• General Shadows: Low
• Global Illumination Quality: Medium
• Effects Quality: Low
• Foliage Quality: Low
• Max Frame Rate: 40 fps
• Motion Blur: Off
• Light Bloom: Off
• Light Shafts: Off
• Low-Light Enhancement: Off
• Enabled Foliage & Fluid Interaction: Off

ARK: Survival Ascended was released in early access for Windows on October 25, 2023, and is scheduled to release for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in November, 2023.