A lead developer for ARK: Survival Ascended says an upcoming engine upgrade will deliver major performance gains. Jeremy Stieglitz confirmed the team is internally testing Unreal Engine 5.7 for a planned release next March. He described the update as a near-magic bullet, expecting a thirty to forty percent improvement in both processor and graphics card performance. The biggest boost comes from new systems for rendering foliage more efficiently, a feature demonstrated recently in a tech demo for another high-profile game.
Stieglitz acknowledged that the game's notorious stuttering issues, common in many Unreal Engine titles, would improve but likely not disappear completely. He explained two core causes specific to ARK. One stems from the online nature of the game, where suddenly loading thousands of player-built structures from network data forces a single thread to handle immense instantiation. The other relates to shader compilation, which the game cannot effectively pre-cache due to its vast amount of content and support for player mods, leading to occasional hitches as new materials are encountered.
The studio plans to adopt a regular schedule of major engine updates moving forward, following their previous transition to version 5.5. Stieglitz expressed confidence in Epic's ongoing optimizations to the engine's core architecture, citing parallel processing improvements in earlier versions that have already helped. The full interview will detail the game's longer-term roadmap and its connection to the delayed sequel.
Stieglitz acknowledged that the game's notorious stuttering issues, common in many Unreal Engine titles, would improve but likely not disappear completely. He explained two core causes specific to ARK. One stems from the online nature of the game, where suddenly loading thousands of player-built structures from network data forces a single thread to handle immense instantiation. The other relates to shader compilation, which the game cannot effectively pre-cache due to its vast amount of content and support for player mods, leading to occasional hitches as new materials are encountered.
The studio plans to adopt a regular schedule of major engine updates moving forward, following their previous transition to version 5.5. Stieglitz expressed confidence in Epic's ongoing optimizations to the engine's core architecture, citing parallel processing improvements in earlier versions that have already helped. The full interview will detail the game's longer-term roadmap and its connection to the delayed sequel.
