Last November we took a look at some of the early public tests for Ark: Survival Ascended on Xbox and found some "interesting results", and now the team at Digital Foundry has given the game a pretty scathing review from a technical perspective - roughly six months after launch.
In a fresh face-off from the tech-focused outlet, the 2023 Ark remake is labelled as "the worst optimised Unreal Engine 5 game we've seen on console". If you look at the video up above, the evidence is pretty damning - the Xbox Series S version looks like a different game almost!
"PS5 and Series X both target 1440p, but with dynamic resolution scaling almost always engaged the game is often rendering at its lower bound of 720p, a 50 percent scale. For Series S, the same logic applies, with a 900p target but most pixel counts resolving to an internal resolution of 450p (again 50 per cent scale)."
To pair with those pretty low internal resolution figures, the frame rate looks to be all over the place in the console versions of Ark: Survival Ascended.
"Kicking off, we have Series S with its 900p target and 450p typical internal resolution. The game is fully unlocked to 60fps, though performance is normally about half that - or worse in dense jungle areas or the scorched earth map. In my playthrough I also found an area in North Zone 1 of the island that dropped frame-rates to as low as 13fps, especially when raining and at night.
Switching over to Series X, we're at least closer to the 60fps mark, with a higher target resolution of 1440p - 720p internal. Frame-rates are generally in the 30-45fps range, but I did spot drops into the high 20s in some areas, like our Series S northern jungle stress point."
Despite playing around with some in-game settings to improve things a little bit, the DF team still thinks that "we really need a push from the developer itself to optimise the game". Xbox Series X and S clearly aren't the real issue here - it's more the actual game itself and how it's been optimised for console play.