Is there a way to improve the poor framerate/performance?

This game looks beautiful, but it has notoriously bad performance. It is by far the number one complaint in the forums. I am getting ~20fps on the lowest settings, with a GTX 780.

History has shown me that people usually find ways to disable the one or two settings that cause horrendous performance like this, but sifting through the forum posts, I haven't found anything yet. So, how can I improve my framerate?

Aha! According to this post, the issue (for Nvidia cards at least) is that the NVidia driver thinks the game is a normal application, and is throttling the GPU as a result.

To disable the throttling:

• Go into the NVidia Control Panel
• Choose the Ark: Survival Evolved .exe file
• Change the 'power management' setting from 'Adaptive' to 'Maximum Performance'

The majority of users report much better performance on Nvidia cards after this fix, but unfortunately I can't find anything similar for ATI cards. I do not have one to test with - maybe someone who does could mess around and report back here?

This is a bit older of a question, but I wanted to provide another answer here in case someone else comes across it (like I did) with a similar issue.

I recently built a new Ryzen 7 2700, 16GB RAM, SSD, and GTX 1080 video card and even on minimum settings, everything turned off or as low as it can go, the game stuttered and was unplayable if I turned too quickly. I tried every setting in game and in the Nvidia control panel, and after any tweak of the in-game settings (Didn't matter what I changed, as long as I changed something), I would have about 30-60 seconds of smooth gameplay before it happened again. CPU utilization was always under 25% total, less than 70% per individual core, and memory utilization was <50% the entire time.

The only thing that worked for me was starting the game without BattlEye enabled, and disabling BattlEye on my private dedicated server. After that, I was able to turn all the settings up to max and the only time I have any kind of stutter is when I first log in and the assets are still loading.

Unfortunately, I know this won't fix the issue for everyone, especially if you play on an official server, but hopefully it'll help somebody else not go through the 3 days of hair pulling I did!