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Studio Wildcard Co-Founder and Co-Creative Director Jesse Rapczak dials in to discuss the Early Access release of ARK: Survival Evolved! The game has only been available on Steam for a couple of days and it’s already off to a fantastic start. We’ll chat about the game, its development, and the lead up to launch, as well as a few upcoming surprises. Come hang out with us!
I’d bought this game. The game plays fun, in spite of poor performance.
PS: But I’m just curious that the performance issues are caused by UE4 or the game dev team. Why had most released UE4 games by now got performance issues?
The performanc issue is because UE4 does not use all cores. That’s the bottleneck. In-house engines from big publishers are exactly optimised to do that, it is what they have all the people for.
UE4, at least on my computer, only uses 2 cores maximum. Most of the time only 1 1/2. No matter how bad the frame rate is, it will not use more.
Unless developers go into source code and set up their own multithreading, UE4 games will run poor. And if a developer is able to do this, then he most likely works in a studio on his own engine.
Thats’s the situation.
Just want to chime in and let you know that we solved a few significant performance bugs this weekend. We had a bug with Single Player that permanently tanked performance on loading a saved game, and we had a server physx bug where 10x too many bodies were created and replicated to each client.
Still a long way to go on performance, but if you haven’t tried the game today give it a shot and let me know if you see any improvements.
I guess what I’m wondering, in regards to performance, is why the performance settings don’t seem to give much if any real benefit - for instance, I can run at completely maxed settings and get 15-20 fps (i7 2600k, 780 Ti SC), and yet when I lower everything to the lowest resolution and settings, I only gain 5-10 FPS if that.
ARK has one of the weirdest performance profiles I’ve ever seen.
Performance aside, I love your game, it has a ton of content for an EA survival game.
I have to agree @n00854180t, I purchased this game ready to play it a bit however, it runs very bad and it’s not an enjoyable experience. I get like 15-20fps. If I set it to 640x480 windowed at the lowest settings (just to see if any improvement) I barely get 30fps. I hope this is improved because the game does look promising. Should get better with time.
There are actually some (very weird) settings you can set at normal resolution to get decent framerates - namely, put “-sm4” (no quotes) in the Steam launch options (note, will make the game look not great), put all settings to Low except for Antialiasing at Medium or High, and put Resolution Scale at the lowest, to the left. You might be able to set textures back to Medium or High as well.
Should give you playable framerates, even though the game looks sort of like a higher res Turok at that point.
Could someone in windowed mode have the task manager cpu usage open next to it to check it. It is not a perfect profiling but definitely gives you an estimate.
I am a bit putting the finger into wound here, because we also see performance issues in our project and no matter what, UE4 runs only on 1 core.
UE4 seems to be practically single core, and with it all releases.
