Gadgetory

hey welcome back to harbor unboxed now every time I put together a benchmark video looking at how a new game performs much like ideas last week with Ferg honor quite a few of you asked me to do the same for Ark survival evolved so I have been meaning to do this for a long time now over the past week I've been testing the current generation lineup of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards in our to see how they perform just briefly for those of you unaware Ark survival evolved is an open-world action adventure survival video game currently in development by Studio wildcard in cooperation with instinct games efecto studios and virtual basement currently the game is scheduled for release on PlayStation 4 Xbox one Microsoft Windows OS X and the Linux sometime this year however many have been testing the game for years now as early access began back in June 2015 in the game players must survive being stranded on an island filled with roaming dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals natural hazards and potential hostile human players the game is powered by the Unreal 4 game engine and the open-world environment contains tens of thousands of artificial intelligent entities according to the developers the game has certainly received a great deal of attention and we think just one month of going on sale the early access produced over 1 million sales by August 2016 the game had over 4 million sales on the PC platform alone gamers really seem to be loving Ark survival evolved that said there is one thing about the game that most aren't loving and that's the performance it seems like for the most part the focus has been on the content first with optimization hopefully coming later that's obviously not a bad thing but with so many gamers addicted to the title they are willing to upgrade naught to achieve better performance so this video I have just tested the current generation GPUs and this still took a serious amount of time to do as I tested not just the epic but also the high and medium quality presets at 1080p at hands 1440p once the game is in better condition or at least released at retail I will retest using the current and previous generation GPUs as well as tested before Kay resolution the testing was conducted using the core i7 7700 K test rig which runs the processor at 4.9 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3000 memory that said the CPU shouldn't really impact performance too heavily only a single thread was really used on our core i7 processor which is a bit surprising and as a result total CPU utilization I only hovered around 30 percent the Pentium G 45 60 for example provided similar results even with the Titan XP just to be clear we are actually looking at 1080p performance here yeah so to say the game is currently unapplied would be quite the understatement only the Titan XP was really only able to deliver perfectly smooth performance with the epic preset and play and frankly the graphics aren't even that great the GTX 980 was 27% file with an average of just 40 fps meanwhile the GTX 1070 only provided performance that could be considered just playable beyond that the game plays like mafia 3 on release day something I found both interesting and very odd was the fact that increase in the resolution didn't seem to reduce the frame rate by all that much I'm not entirely sure what the holdup was at 1080p but it seems like those with higher end GPUs might as well play at 1440p lowering the resolution probably won't help improve frame rates in an effort to boost performance I did drop down to the higher quality preset and this had a profound impact the Titan XP for example is now 82 percent faster hitting 100 FPS on average in fact all graphics cards enjoyed a significant performance boost the Radeon rx for a 8 gigabyte for example is now 73% faster though it's still on the average 38 fps in fact for decent performance at tiny pv gtx 1070 is still called for this time increasing the resolution did have a more noticeable impact on performance at least for the higher-end graphics cards oddly once again though we did see that the mid-range and lowering cards only dropped a few frames per second and i'm not really sure how to explain that ok so now using the medium quality settings we find that usually capable GPUs such as the rx 470 and GTX 1066 gigabyte still aren't able to achieve a 60 FPS average Nvidia does appear to do slightly better but even so the performance clearly isn't very good once again we see that for the most part scaling is very strange when ramping up the resolution the GTX 1066 gigabyte for example drops just 3 FPS on average despite having a deal with almost 80% more pixel as I was wrapping the testing up I thought it might be interesting to see how a pair of tighten XP graphics cards run in SLI since the resolution doesn't seem to impact performance that much I went straight to 4k for the testing the darker blue bar shows the GPU usage as reported by MSI Afterburner and as you can see the usage wasn't that high usage was virtually identical on both GPUs so I just took the average using the epic preset we only saw 75% utilization on the Titan XP graphics cards and this allows 63 fps as you can see as I reduce the quality preset the framerate did increase though interestingly GPU utilization fell away well I hope that was somewhat useful for you guys who have been requesting an arc benchmark and it seems like if you are having performance issues the best thing to do is downgrade the quality settings hardly surprising I know but what was surprising was the fact that lowering the resolution won't help or at least doesn't really seem to help much didn't in my case which is bizarre and I honestly don't really know how to explain that or what's going on there and I haven't really invested a whole lot of time playing the Oh messing around with it I just unfortunately don't have time what I can tell you is the game isn't particularly CPU demanding at least if you're using a relatively modern Intel processor something else worth noting is that 8 gigabytes of system memory probably isn't enough the game will gobble up all eight gigabytes right away therefore sixteen gigabytes seems to be the minimum for running this title actually the game is a bit of a memory Pig all around vrm is also heavily used if available the game will consume over four gigabytes at 1080p and over five gigabytes at 1440p finally at the time of testing crossfire didn't appear to be working at least it wasn't with a pair of our X 480 obviously SLI is working as we tested this on a pair of Titan XP graphics cards and scaling is quite good in fact it's probably about the only way gamers can hope to play this game using decent quality settings anyway I have no idea how many of you guys actually wanted to watch this video and see a benchmark for the game but for those of you who have been requesting it I hope the information included was worthwhile if you are a fan of the game and want to see more in-depth breakdown upon release please let me know in the comments below and I'll look at making that happen I'm your host Steve catch again soon you