Lost Ark micro-stutters, FPS drops, & performance issues come to light

Developed by Tripod Studio and Smilegate RPG, Lost Ark is a 2.5D MMORPG. It was released as a free-to-play in Europe and the Americas a few days ago.

The game focuses on PvE and open-world exploration. Players can customize their characters and can level up by completing the storyline. After players reach level 50, the character’s gear score is leveled to their progress.

While both players and critiques have praised Lost Ark for gameplay and mechanics, some are now complaining about FPS drops, micro stutters, and performance issues negatively affecting the experience.

Several players are complaining about micro-stutters (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) making the game impossible to play. Even people with high-end systems are reporting the issue, indicating that something is indeed wrong with Lost Ark.

I’m not sure about anybody else, but for me and other people I’ve talked to in my server, it seems like people are experiencing constant micro stuttering/hitching issues. For me personally, every time I move around and the camera pans (no matter where I am), my game would do this split-second micro stutter/skip. It seems like the micro stutter is related to whenever the fps drops, even if the frames drop by only 1-3 there will be a stutter. It has become so annoying and almost makes me not want to play because it’s so distracting to my eyes.
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On a 3080/9900k with G-sync optimal settings on a 1440p 165hz monitor and I still get frequentish frametime spikes (microstutters when running around) I tried doing a solo map dungeon and it was smooth so is it possible its related to rendering players/stuff in and out in the map? I already tried lowering some graphics settings and playing in fullscreen and disabling area chat but its still not enough. I’m wondering if the game is showing the age of its outdated Unreal engine 3 with its limitations and the fact its still using dx9.
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It looks like Lost Ark developers are already aware of frequent micro-stutter and are working to fix it. But there is no timeframe on when it will be resolved.

Yes, the team is aware and working on this, for the release of the game the option for dx11 was added and that did help out a lot but there is still work to be done. I really appreciate your patience on this, take care
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We came across a bunch of workarounds that involve disabling HDR and FreeSync, playing fullscreen or switching to DirectX 9 helps as well. Players also said disabling voice and text chat did the trick for them.

And apart from the micro-stutters, Lost Ark players seem to be experiencing FPS drops. This is angering a lot of players (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) since it is making the game completely unplayable.

Have a 1080 ti, 16 GB ram, i7-4790k and I get about 120 fps during combat etc as long as I play without moving my mouse. As soon as I move my mouse around, I get huge fps drops. This fps drop from the mouse movement is even happening when nothing happens on the screen (character standing still) a nd intensifies the faster I move my mouse around. If I make big circles with my mouse from the edges of my monitor, the game will literally freeze (0 fps) for 4-5 seconds. Any suggestions on what the problem could be? playing on dsx11 in fullscreen mode.
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Hello. I have recently downloaded the game on my PC and to my surprise the game seems to be working very poorly. I have massive fps drops and random stutters while walking, using abilities etc. Also the game starts 3-4 min after I press PLAY. When I play PVP I have massive stutters in the beginning of the match (10-12 sec) and after that it runs smooth.
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Fortunately, we did come across a workaround that seems to have helped with the FPS drops and stuttering issues.

So after fiddling around and doing research I completely fixed my stutter and the game is now smooth even in the city, all i did was change my mouse polling rate from 1000 to 250 and boom the stutter magically vanished. I can no longer find the post but a million thanx to the person who posted on the lost ark forums
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While we keep tabs on the matter, do let us know if the aforementioned workaround fixed the issues for you.

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Gaming Section so be sure to follow them as well.

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