Ark Survival Evolved Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

After almost two years of early access on Steam, the survival game Ark has finally been officially released for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. First things first: even though the game is referred to as “final” and the developers had plenty of time to address the numerous bugs and issues reported during the early access period the game is still far from perfect. Despite the short period of time we spent with it we found numerous graphics glitches, sound bugs, clipping bugs, as well as other problems ranging from things like path finding to dinosaurs randomly falling out of the sky after loading a game. At least those were all minor glitches that didn’t have a massive impact on our overall gaming experience. The game’s overall system requirements have the potential to do so but we’ll get to that later.

But first, let’s cover the basics. The game is built around the Unreal Engine 4 by Epic Games that really shines in high details settings. In addition to crisp textures we adored the thick vegetation, the impressive weather effects, and the day/night rhythm. Lighting is also very nice even though we find it to be a bit exaggerated, resulting in reflections on all sorts of organic material that make it look like metal. Anti-aliasing is also not exactly stellar – even on its highest settings some objects, such as palm leaves, seem to flicker severely. Apparently, Ark is utilizing a rather simple post-processing anti-aliasing algorithm.

The settings menu is surprisingly extensive. While more detailed explanations would have been welcome the 30+ available options are impressive. Some settings can only be turned on or off, others can be fine-tuned more extensively (see screenshots below). Their respective impact on performance varies between negligible and massive. For those of us who prefer playing rather than fiddling with settings a total of four presets are available. Unfortunately, we find them to lack refinement. For example, the medium setting has some settings set to epic while the epic setting doesn’t necessarily mean that all settings are enabled or maxed out. Accordingly, some additional fine-tuning might be necessary.

One thing to note is that regardless of preset, Ark reduces the resolution via “Resolution Scale” somewhat to improve overall frame rates while at the same time resulting in a slightly mushy and blurry image. Thus, after selecting a new preset we had to manually reset this option to 100 % every time. In addition, we found it quite bothersome and annoying that some settings require a restart of the entire game, and more often than not a change in resolution had not been applied after restarting the game. The latter in particular needs to be addressed by the developers asap. In addition to powerful hardware, the game also requires a large hard drive. Despite a download size of only 16 GB once installed the game required around 60 GB without any additional mods installed. Loading times were decent with an SSD, loading from HDDs is obviously going to be significantly slower.