The developers of ARK: Survival Ascended recently claimed that the transition to Unreal Engine 5.5 would provide "better performance." In practice, everything turned out differently.
The ARK: Lost Colony expansion, released on December 19, 2025, demonstrates even weaker performance than the base version of the game. At native 4K resolution and maximum Epic settings, even a top-tier graphics card fails to maintain a stable 30 frames per second. In the zWORMz Gaming test, the frame rate in such a configuration drops to 24–25 fps. This refers to standard maximum settings without mods.
With DLSS enabled in Quality mode, the RTX 5090 shows about 40 fps in 4K. Even DLSS Performance does not allow reaching 60 frames.
ARK: Lost Colony is just part of a broader problem related to the poor optimization of Unreal Engine 5. Even version 5.5 continues to experience serious difficulties when working with Lumen and Nanite. There are successfully optimized games on UE5, such as ARC Raiders, but such projects, as a rule, do not use Lumen and other standard features of this technology at all.
