Apparently ARK: Survival Ascended's trick for better FPS is to sneakily turn on FSR frame gen

ARK: Survival Ascended, the remastered take on Survival Evolved, has been in early access for a long time now, but the game has hit some fresh controversy.

Survival Ascended has always been under fire for its performance levels (with UE 5), and how far the graphics need to be notched down to get a smooth frame rate, and now we're told that the developer's solution is to enable frame generation - without informing the player.

As Sebastian Castellanos pointed out on X (see the above post), not only does ARK: Survival Ascended have FSR frame generation turned on, but you can't turn it off from the graphics settings. There's simply no option listed, so you wouldn't have a clue it's actually running.

This was discovered by YouTube channel zWORMz Gaming, who also found that you can disable the frame generation tech using a console command. However, by doing that, you are reportedly halving the frame rate, as VideoCardz (which spotted the X post) points out. Nasty.

In fact, going by some of the comments on various online forums, ARK: Survival Ascended has been this way for some time, though we can't verify that.

There are reports on Reddit going back to when ARK was updated to implement FSR 3 frame generation (and NVIDIA FG was stripped out) which observe that it's in the game, and can't be turned off. That was eight months ago.

Regardless of how long it's been, to have drafted in FSR frame generation seems like a far less than ideal solution as a kind of permanent band aid, rather than getting down to the nuts-and-bolts of better optimizing the graphics performance.