Lost Ark – How To Fix Lag and FPS Drops

Amazon has been trying to get their feet into the gaming world for a long time. Amazon already owns massive products such as Twitch for streaming, AWS for cloud, and a lot more. Money has never been an issue for Amazon, but the key was to get a title that could do well for them. This time around, they have figured it out; last year, they announced New World, a successful launch. This year, we have Lost Ark; so far, the game looks good and is being liked by everyone.

Lost Ark was just released on Steam. We all wonder why the game suddenly has 1.2 million people watching on Twitch. Many people are playing the game even if you remove the larger streamers. The game is a massive ARPG with a lot of content, and for those who don’t know, the game was initially released back in 2019 in South Korea. It was just released globally today.

Embark on an odyssey for the Lost Ark in a vast, vibrant world: explore new lands, seek out lost treasures, and test yourself in thrilling action combat. Define your fighting style with your class and advanced class, and customize your skills, weapons, and gear to bring your might to bear as you fight against hordes of enemies, colossal bosses, and dark forces seeking the power of the Ark in this action-packed free-to-play RPG.

Lost ARK Steam Page

The game is well optimized and runs excellent on PCs of all kinds. The discussion forums are filled with errors and rants about the game not being unlocked for some countries. But performance-wise, I was unable to find any threads.

This article will follow some basic tweaks and optimizations that can boost your FPS by a little bit.

Lost Ark – How To Fix Lag

Lost Ark System Requirements?

These are the official system requirements of Lost Ark.

This game should run well on most computers. The mentioned graphics card requirements are very low, even for the recommended hardware. According to Steam Data, Nvidia’s 10 series cards are still used a lot. This is sad and true at the same time because of the hoarding and scalping of 30 series cards.

Best Video Settings for Lost ARK

Screen Effects Settings

Post Processing FX Advanced Settings

The game runs on Unreal Engine 3 and is well optimized, we’ve already gone through the system requirements. You don’t really need a beefy computer to run this game. If your system passes the requirements, just, set everything to Very High and tone down each setting to test what works best for you.

Whenever you have FPS troubles, the first thing you should do is change video settings and tone some of the things down.

Disable In-Game Chat

The game uses a rather interesting chat system that I believe will not be used by most. Everyone loves using Discord and online communities for information and communication in today’s world.

You can disable the chat overlay, which has shown a lot of improvement in FPS. Thanks to a Reddit post. To disable chat, click on chat, select settings, and untick the area chat checkbox.

Check the polling rate of your mouse

Polling rate is the number of times per second a mouse reports its position to the computer. Most gaming mice have a polling rate of 1000 Hz (1 ms), which is faster than the standard rate of 125 Hz (8 ms). A higher polling rate allows for smoother movement and better response time in games.

Thanks to the guys at Reddit, we figured out that this is a problem. Having a polling rate higher than 500 Hz can create stuttering issues in Lost Ark. Fixing this is easy; open your gaming mouse’s software; below is an example of Razer’s Synapse for Razer Viper Ultimate.

Now that we are done with the game settings let’s move on to some traditional ways of boosting in-game performance.

Update Your Device Drivers

• Download Nvidia Drivers
• Download AMD Drivers

Do you wonder why you should update your graphic card drivers? It would be good to check on the new updates for two key reasons. Firstly, it’s the only way to ensure you have the latest drivers for your device. The more recent drivers will allow your computer to run every graphics-intensive application and keep up with any changes in technology without trailing too far behind.

Change Graphic Control Panel Panel Settings

Here are a few tweaks for both Nvidia and AMD Users that will provide instantly boost your FPS in Lost Ark:

For Nvidia Users:

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “Lost ARK”, you can manually add the game if it’s not in the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

Disable Core-Isolation to Boost FPS on Windows 11

Core Isolation is a new built-in Windows 11 that protects your PC from untrusted applications and drivers. The tradeoff is the performance. But this will not be an issue for anyone who doesn’t download anything from untrusted sites.

Here’s how you can disable it:

• Click on Start Menu button and select settings
• Click Privacy and Security > Windows Security > Device Security
• Here you will find Core Isolation, click on Core isolation details

• On the next screen, you will find a radio button for “Memory Integrity”, just turn it off.

You’ve successfully disabled VBS on Windows 11. Many users on Reddit have reported this to significantly improve performance for many games. We’re talking about improvements of about 20-30 fps straightaway.

Enable Game Mode

We’ve noticed considerable improvements in the Game Mode in Windows 11. For Windows 10, we suggest disabling both Game mode and game bar, whereas this option should be enabled on Windows 11.

To Enable: Type game mode in search and enable it.

These settings and optimizations were tested on PCs with the following configuration:

• i5 8500 with GTX 1060 @1080p
• i3 10300 with RTX 2060 @1080p
• i7 8700 with GTX 1650 @1080p
• AMD Ryzen 5600x with RTX 3080 @2k

Make sure to comment below if this guide helped you out; we tried this on four gaming systems and saw an instant improvement.

After the major acquisitions, Microsoft and Sony Entertainment have already stepped up their gaming divisions. Namely, Bungie by Sony and Activision by Microsoft. Both of these studios are very big and have created one of the most successful titles in the gaming industry. Lost Ark so far has been a massive hit for Amazon; the game hasn’t stopped since the release and is still doing well, according to the numbers we see on Steam.