Under minimum specs? We got you covered.

- 1. Not Tested / 2. Performance is Acceptable
- Playthrough (Finished) - 1. Base loading can break a lot of willpower / 2. Performance is Acceptable
- Playthrough - (Army stage) - 1. Not Tested / 2. Performance is Acceptable
- Planned for achievement - TBD ~February
- Planned for Engram Unlock - TBD ~February
- Playthrough - TBD
- Playthrough - TBD
- 1 & 2. Performance is Above Expectations at Spawns


- Might become Home Server
- Planned - TBD
- Playthrough - TBD
- Playthrough - TBD
- TBD
- This terrifies my PC - TBD
- TBD
- TBD
- Planned TBD
- TBD

So, you're unsure if your system can even handle ASA. Before you jump into your solo world to benchmark with the awful default settings every game comes with, let's use some previous knowledge of how other games are handled on your system.


We know that ASA is running on Unreal5, so we have immediate red flags placed all around. Not to worry! As abysmal as it sounds, we should be looking at our graphics card. For this guide, we will be utilizing the NVIDIA GTX980 gpu (AMD Radeon RX 590 equivalent). Let's head to the "Video" tab under "General" in the Menu Settings of ASA and see what we're dealing with.



With what we know about our GPU, we can discern it runs games best at a modest resolution of 1366x768. Anything lower, we get too much pixelation. Any higher, and the card begins to heavily struggle under the render load. Since it's Unreal5, 60fps should not be your target framerate, so we'll go ahead and set this to 30.

Why 30fps? We'll be utilizing the Unreal upscaler at 100 Resolution Scale. Upscalers are finnicky creatures, constantly changing the textures in-game higher or lower in order to hit the target framerate. The lower the target, the better we can make our visuals (in most cases). Lowering the cap to 15fps helps reduce GPU temps as well.

The Window Mode doesn't change much, but it really affects your "alt-tab" game. If you're hard set on being a Fullscreen user, you should utilize the "alt-enter" keybind combo before alt-tabbing. For the sake of troubleshooting, we set this to "Windowed".

Frame Generation. For the love of Raptor Claus set this to NONE and bury it six feet below like a Giga. We do not need this precious processing power wasted like Syntac's army fighting Grendel (My man, what were you THINKING?)

VSyncMode we most definitely want ON. Screen tearing will be prevalent if left off and WILL disorient you across several maps.

DO NOT FORGET TO SAVE YOUR SETTINGS


Phew, still with me? Good. Now let's navigate over to the GRAPHICS tab under GENERAL. This is not where the true optimization magic begins, but moreso building the skeletal foundation.


The settings on the left — No, that's your right. The LEFT. You see all those beautiful options? LOW EVERYTHING. You heard me. Everything to LOW. Remember, this is not the magic. ASA doesn't look horrible with this, and if you say otherwise I'm going to require telling you that you cannot define by opinion. We want to play the game, not watch a slideshow with a hefty input latency. We're not done yet, though. The current experience with these settings is not enough to justify your purchase, so we'll be looking to the right side of the settings to bolster that moolah.


Alright! Now we're talking most of the finer processing things. Yes, I called them things. However...
MOTION BLUR IS LIKE SWAMP FEVER. WE STAY MILES AWAY FROM IT. TURN THAT OFF. :>
Light Bloom we turn off, same with Light Shafts being turned off. We'll touch more on that later when we get to the MAGIC part.
Low-Light Enhancement? Sure, yeah. On or off, depending on your monitor.
All of those foliage settings? Definitely want those as low or off as possible. That's processing power being used when we need it the most (aka RUN FOR YOUR DAMN LIFE WITHOUT HITCHING).
Footstep Particles? Gone. OFF. We don't want to be generating things when we move. Footstep Decals you can leave on or off, depends on how much attention to detail you want (mainly for Screenshot purposes would you actually use this).
Disable HLOD. This is a trick setting. It says DISABLE. HLOD stands for HIGH LEVEL OF DETAIL (I presume). If set to OFF, we create a double-negative scenario meaning it WILL UTILIZE HLOD. Turn this on, because we are enlightened to the English language.
GUI 3D Widget Quality. I haven't played much with this setting, to be honest. I really should while writing. However I am currently sitting in Scorched Earth making this at the very early stages so for expedited purposes let's set that to 0.
Reduce Resolution In Inventory. This is a toss of a coin on hitching. ON or OFF, you will still experience the infamous frame-lock hitching while opening an inventory every now and then. Save your processing power and set it to OFF. That sounds backwards, doesn't it? The reason is that ASA renders it first, then lowers the resolution. Having it OFF prevents the extra last step.


These are all mostly personal preference settings. Feel free to adjust these to your situation, I'm not your dad. However, there are two(2) specific settings I will tell you to change in the CAMERA tab.
CAMERA SHAKE SCALE. Set that to 0. Why? Why am I getting rid of that? Occlusion Culling is a blessing and a curse - it de-renders what you can't see. But when coming into view, it renders again. If this is being rapidly implemented, it will bog down the system more. CAMERA VIEW BOB, we set to OFF as well to mitigate as much as possible.

"What about the 'Hide Enemy Structure Cosmetics'? That'll hurt my system too!"
Well yes, it will. This is personal preference though. I like seeing what other people have done, and I have the tolerance to stare in awe as they all load.



Whew, almost through the menu settings! Soon, we can play, right? WRONG! You still have much to learn, my survivor! This is still NOT ENOUGH to quote-unquote play. We're about to activate the MAGIC area now! Navigate to the ADVANCED tab of your menu settings. On the far left side, you'll see some text that says Console Access. Slap that to ON and ascend to the next Ark- I mean Chapter. Move to the next Chapter.

Congratulations on your Ascension to this Chapter, Survivor! The main menu settings are akin to The Island as the Console is akin to Scorched Earth. Saddle up, and get ready to be terrified of altering anything.




Welcome to the sweet vegetable cake that is optimization. To access this part, just hit the ~ (Tilde) key on your keyboard. Before you start typing anything, let's go with a rundown of what each does, where it effects the most, and how to fine tune it to your liking. FROM THE TOP!

- Most notably visuals. Want it looking like PS2 graphics at a distance? keep it at 2. You can get away with having it set to 4-16, but no higher. We like our performance, and it doesn't affect too much when viewing things up close
- This is not a must, but preferred. Setting this to 0 heavily affects performance in the best way possible. Now we're getting them oldschool graphics - If your minimap is fuzzy and can't handle looking at it, replace "0" with "1" and wait a bit. Have patience.
- This setting balances ALL lighting in reference to the base lighting of your camera. It enables you to see and save on post-processing power. (TL;DR you can find a much better description than mine)
- Fog is one of the main affecters for performance. Setting this to 0 disables fog entirely with exception to a map's baked in fog (See Valguero)
- Immediately noticeable and significantly impacts performance. Removing shadows does not affect the cascades, so this is just a step for removing all shadows
- Removes reflections from water, allowing you to kinda see into it while not in it. It does minimally impact performance
- Minimal impact, not noticeable with our settings
- Minimal impact, not noticeable with our settings
- Minimal impact, not noticeable with our settings
- Minimal impact, hardly noticeable with our settings
- Moderate impact, visually noticeable by lighting up shadows
- Significant impact, not noticeable visually but you can sure as heck feel it
- Minimal impact, not noticeable with our settings
- Significant impact, visually noticeable as a step to completely remove shadows
- Minimal impact, not noticeable with our settings
- Minimal impact, hardly noticeable with our settings due to the Global Illumination line
- Major impact, removes baseline shadows from existence. To fully remove shadows, see all shadow commands above
- Significant impact, removes foliage clutter in a radius around the camera
- Minor impact, removes most grass clutter in a radius around the camera
- Significant impact, not as powerful as the volumetric fog line but definitely piggybacks the process
- Does not work
- Medium impact, makes non-harvestable grass disappear
- Does absolutely N O T H I N G after thorough testing on our system
- Very minor impact, not noticeable with our settings
- BIGGEST IMPACT. ASA utilizes REAL CLOUD SIMULATIONS. This removes ALL OF THEM and renders the simulating INERT, REDUNDANT, and a 2x framerate boost
- Situational impact. This disables almost ALL particles. However, this removes your ability to visually identify buffs, alpha dinos, shiny dinos (mod). I have not figured out the command to revert this. Relaunching the game enables particles. ALSO DISABLES SEEING ARTIFACTS
- Disables gpu rendered particles
- Removes particles from things such as the Air Conditioner (ie. no more A/C fog)
- Disables GPU particles for whatever that is
- Disables NinjaLive's fluid sim
- If your dinos look straight up PS1 Hagrid, use this. Other variables that have been known to work are 500 / 1000 / 1500



Not so fast, hotshot! There's still a couple more things you should be aware of, like the PrimalConsole.ini. In this file, you'll find EVERY COMMAND YOU HAVE EVER INPUT. Due to our troubleshooting nature, our in-game console will become FLOODED with commands we won't be using again. Where do you find this file?
You can adjust all of these safely, just remember, though: ANY EDITS YOU MAKE AND SAVE WHILE THE GAME IS OPEN WILL BE UNDONE ON NEXT LAUNCH. MAKE SURE THE GAME'S PROCESS IS FULLY ENDED BEFORE MAKING EDITS AND SAVING
Another note! This does not make the commands run on startup, just loads them into the CONSOLE HISTORY. To access the history of commands used, while the console bar is showing at the bottom of the screen, press the UP or DOWN arrow.

If utilizing all (or most) of these commands, get ready to become an audiophile! These commands will make it so you DO NOT SEE WEATHER EVENTS!!! Scorched Earth Sandstorms? Not visible. Lightning Strikes? Not visible. Valguero Storms? Not visible. You get the idea. The Jerboa tame is going to be your greatest asset!

Alright. I've been avoiding this for a while. I never trust startup commands, and after 2 hours of wanting to scream at Wildcard on this front plus tons of outdated info provided by the community everywhere... Get ready to follow this train wreck.

If you've provided info on this topic of running console commands on game launch using Steam, thank you for your patronage towards this guide. I have scoured all over numerous forums, websites, and the like to figure this out in addition to troubleshooting each and every method. I'm at sorrow to say that on startup command is not feasible with this list, and the amount of Unreal crash reports I've sent has been more in the past 2 hours than in the past 5 years of my gaming history.
THANK YOU REDDIT POSTERS. BE NOTICED. BE PROUD.
Perusing through the info of a 2yr/old discussion, we have a mutual compromise that works with most, if not all commands in our list INCLUDING THE CLOUD LINE!

Woah, woah, WOAH!! This is my personal time we're talking, here... Geez...
Open your file browser, and navigate yourself to ...\ShooterGame\Binaries as shown in the folder below and make a text file (.txt) here.
Name it whatever you want, but DO NOT INCLUDE A SPACE IN THE NAME. Make it simple, memorable, and easy to type. For me, lowspec.txt
In this file, we are going to input Every darn command in this list separated by a |, no spaces required. In the end, the text file should look like this:

No, but this does prevent you from pasting a long string of code! Allow me to introduce you to the exec command!
Whether you're in the main menu or in game, open your Console and type
Because of how we formatted the text in the file, it will run every command in order, but be prepared for a much longer response time for the game to implement everything at mach3, if not done in menu.

Also figured out that individual chapters for Steam Guides have a character limit because of this, so thank you for the suggestion to add this to the guide!

I am a merciful Overseer. Here you can see how it looks as still-images throughout the troubleshooting phases. Keep in mind that still-images will always look worse than in-the-moment action, and monitor sizes create per-user basis on visuals. I utilize a 32" monitor and I can count the pixels from 3 feet away (regardless of program running).

- Wear charged Tek Armor to mitigate fall damage or fly back up to the dino.
- Always have a couple Parachute on hotbar to gain that spare time to whistle the dino to follow.
- If you log in after sleeping on a bed, simply lay back down and get up to fix the rubberbanding.


- Try to keep enough space on your drive, ideally 300-400gb extra space.
- If not enough space on the installation drive, Steam will use another drive that has enough space to do the patching, and more often than not it will utilize the worst drive possible.
- If none of your drives has enough space to reinstall ASA fully, you're in for a bad time.

Audio Encoder - FFmpeg AAC
Video Encoder - NVIDIA NVENC H.264
Rescale Output - Lanczos (Sharpened scaling, (36 samples) / 1280x720
Encod- "I THOUGHT YOU SAID LOWERING RESOLUTION MADE EVERYTHING PIXELATED OR SOME BS IN A PREVIOUS CHAPTER!!" ..... This is different. This guarantees the broadcast platform to rescale the output so viewers have options to watch in higher or lower qualities because 720p is a staple resolution in the baseline constant. Can I continue now? Sweet!
Encoder Settings box. Rate Control should always be Constant Bitrate. Bitrate is 100% dependent on your Internet Service Provider (ISP) plan. Funny how we're entering 2026, and rural networks still PALE IN COMPARISON. Mine is set to 4000 because of my ISP, but if you've got a powerhouse of a network, set to 6000.
Keyframe interval - 2 s. If you're streaming to Twitch, this is staple and do not change it.
Preset - P5: Slow (Good Quality). Just below average, this doesn't consume too many resources while maintaining quality.
Tuning - Low Latency.
Multipass Mode - Two Passes (Quarter Resolution)
Profile - high. This setting sets OBS's process priority to Above normal when you hit the Start Streaming button.
Look-ahead - Off. This setting is akin to the game's UPSCALER. We don't need another set of variable visual quality jumping around the place like a Procoptodon. It also eats resources. Mouseover the (?) to learn more
Adaptive Quantization - On. Mouseover the (?) to learn more because I just woke up.
B-Frames - 2.
Now we'll be looking at the Video tab of the settings, and here we can justify that rescaled output further. Notice how our base canvas resolution is NOT A STANDARD ASPECT RATIO. Broadcaster platforms do not like this. 683:384? Yeah, they'll be throwing spears at you. Set that Output (Scaled) Resolution to 1280x720 to get that industry-standard 16:9 for selectable quality options for the viewer.
Downscale Filter - Lanczos (Sharpened scaling, 36 samples).
This dropbox, we want to select Common FPS Values and set that to 30. Since we're playing the game at 30fps, we do not need to be spitting out more than that.
I'm not going to delve into this section too much, as I'm immediately assuming you have at least some knowledge of experience here, or have the brainpower to put 2 and 2 together to figure this out. However, for you PVP players....
Yes, you can stream ASA. This also means that High-end pc users no longer have an excuse while I exist. Ark: Survival Ascended only runs as you make it run. If you make the settings so that it runs like slower than an Achatina, that's on YOU, not Wildcard.

-Due to the visual effects and/or animations, the Phoenix will devour your performance when in close proximity and looking at it (within 5-10ft). Taming it is a hassle, due to the increased input latency and choppy framerate. Riding one is alright, but there is still a negative performance impact that can be disorienting. I consider this a prize tame and worth the suffering, but don't leave it out where you frequently move about.
-GPU usage increases by ~60%+

-If you enter through the crystal entrance, be prepared for several load hitches (3-5) as you progress to the underground. Be prepared to reset your position by dismounting/mounting in order to break the rubberbanding after hitching.

-If they used AI for the image, they probably used it for the textures, and they probably used it for the code.

NiranV, as evident in their discord server — publicly accessible through mod descriptions, not subject for removal.


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-Fixed minor spelling mistake in The Console Chapter (3:55pm)
-Added Chapter Guide Update Log
-Added AMD GPU equivalent in Chapter The Main Menu Settings
-Added info about Weather Events in chapter The Console
-Added killparticles to the Chapter The Console
-Added entry to the Chapter Bonus Tips! (10:11am)
-Updated r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Allow 0 impact in Chapter The Console
-Added Chapter Broadcasting and begun info filling
-Populated Chapter Broadcasting (2:03am)
-Added Chapter Current Investigations and populated info (9:44am)
-Added Screenshot to Chapter How Does it Look?
-Capitalized chapter How Does It Look for consistency
-Added QA estimated timeframes for maps in Chapter Current Investigations (3:00pm)
-Added Chapter Jiniix806 Request after Chapter The Console and populated info (9:35pm)
-Added info to the end of 4th paragraph in Chapter The Main Menu Settings
-Added entry to the Chapter Bonus Tips! (2:09pm)
-Added 2 entries to the section ASA CLIENT in Chapter Current Investigations
-Added Chapter Avoid and populated with info
-Changed info in Chapter Current Investigations
-Added MODS section in Chapter Avoid
-Removed redundant time clarification in Chapter Guide Update Log
-Added tip under Rubberbanding in the Chapter Bonus Tips! (6:17am)
-Added more entries to the Chapter The Console, edited descriptions of some others
-Added artifact impact to killparticles in Chapter The Console (7:28pm)
-Updated r.Streaming.PoolSize line descriptor in Chapter The Console
-Updated Chapter Current Investigations
-Clarified keybind name in Chapter The Console
-Added GPU usage to Phoenix in Chapter Avoid (5:34am)
-Added Chapter AI Blacklist, Section 1, populating with names at a later time
-Updated introductory text
-Removed some screenshots in Chapter How Does it Look? (9:40pm)
-Updated command line r.MaterialQualityLevel in Chapter The Console (9:43pm)
-Clarified Chapter AI Blacklist, Section 1 within text body (9:55pm)
-Retitled Chapter to AI Blacklist - Modders
-Added Chapter AI Blacklist - Streamers, populating with names at a later time
-Populated Chapter AI Blacklist - Modders with names
-Updated FX.MaxCPUParticlesPerEmitter 0 description in Chapter The Console
-Added Pagefile Location to the Chapter Current Investigations
-Updated overall performance of tested maps in Chapter Current Investigations
-Added command line to the Chapter The Console in light of a recent update affecting dino polys
-Added entry pertaining to update patching in Chapter Bonus Tips!
-Removed KBD Ascended: Valyrian Reins mod by Kraken_1 from the Chapter Avoid as it has been fixed
-Updated disclaimer in Chapter Current Investigations
-Updated Chapter Current Investigations to inform about situation