Best Settings For Lost Ark (PC) [Boost FPS Easily] - GamingScan (2023)

Lost Ark is an incredible fantasy MMOARPG game with a lot to offer.

But, naturally, the game is far from perfect. Like all other games, Lost Ark also has performance issues and flaws. Nevertheless, this guide will help you put those performance problems in the game back into working order in a flash.

Keep reading this guide to optimize your Lost Ark settings and enjoy a much smoother gaming experience.

By simply following this guide, Lost Ark performance issues that you encounter during gameplay can be resolved such as lagging, freezing, stuttering, lag spikes, low frames per second (FPS), FPS drops, and repeated game crashing.

First of all, you need to be in no doubt that your PC where you will be running Lost Ark meets the recommended system requirements of the game that are listed below. If your PC does not meet the requirements, performance issues are certainly to be expected. Our recommendation for that is for you to look into upgrading your PC if that is the case.

Lost Ark is a CPU and graphics-intensive game with its isometric 2.5D point of view, so you can expect to boost the game’s performance via freeing up CPU resources by closing other applications while playing or upgrading your processor to the latest model.

Let’s get started with the system requirements!

Lost Ark System Requirements

Here are the MINIMUM Lost Ark System Requirements:

• Lost Ark requires a 64-bit processing system.
• CPU: Intel Core i3 / AMD Ryzen 3 or better
• RAM: 8 GB or more
• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit only) / Windows 11 (64-bit only)
• VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 / AMD Radeon HD 6850
• DIRECTX: 9.0c
• PIXEL SHADER: 5.0
• VERTEX SHADER: 5.0
• FREE STORAGE DISK SPACE: 50 GB or more available space
• DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1024 MB or more
• NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection

Here are the RECOMMENDED Lost Ark System Requirements:

• CPU: Intel Core i5 / AMD Ryzen 5 or better
• RAM: 16 GB or more
• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit only) / Windows 11 (64-bit only)
• VIDEO CARD (GPU) 1080p: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 / AMD Radeon RX 560
• VIDEO CARD (GPU) 1440p: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
• VIDEO CARD (GPU) 4K: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 6800
• DIRECTX: 11
• PIXEL SHADER: 5.1
• VERTEX SHADER: 5.1
• FREE STORAGE DISK SPACE: 50 GB or more available space
• DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB or more
• NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection

Unfortunately, Lost Ark is only available to the Windows OS and is currently not available to other operating systems such as macOS or Linux.

How To Verify Your PC Hardware

If you are unsure about your PC’s hardware, you can check the full specifications of your PC by following these steps:

1. Open Start.
2. Search for msinfo32 and click the top result to open the System Information app.
3. Select the System Summary category from the left navigation pane.
4. On the right side, confirm the computer specifications, including system model and type, processor (CPU) brand and model, UEFI (or legacy BIOS) version and other details, system memory capacity (RAM), motherboard brand and model, and virtualization support.
5. Select the Display option to view the graphics card (GPU) technical information.

From here, you can double-check if your PC matches that of the minimum and the recommended system requirements to run the game Lost Ark.

Other than that, follow these short easy steps to check if your GPU is compatible with DirectX 9 or compatible with DirectX 11:

1. Open the Windows Start Menu
2. Typedxdiag and press Enter
3. If it asks permission to check whether your drivers are digitally signed, we recommend that you pressYes

You should now be able to see your DirectX version — refer to the image below:

There are a lot of ways to increase your PC’s performance in Lost Ark. Let’s start with the most essential and obvious one.

Update Your Graphics Card Drivers

Lost Ark is a graphics-intensive fantasy MMOARPG wherein a lot of the visual effects in the game are processed by your PC’s graphics card. Therefore, the first thing you should check is if your graphics card drives are up to date.

It is important to update the drivers of your PC’s graphics card to ensure that it has the latest version and graphics-intensive games such as Lost Ark will be able to run smoothly.

NVIDIA graphics card users can download the latest drivers here.

AMD graphics card users can download the latest drivers here.

If there is an update available, download and install it.

Best Graphics Settings For Lost Ark

This next portion will focus on optimizing your settings in the game itself. These best settings are most likely the reason why you are here reading this guide, so let’s get started.

Note that these settings prioritize HighPerformance. If you have a PC that barely meets the minimum or recommended system requirements, you can skip this step. If you have a powerful PC and do not want to sacrifice your visual settings for extra performance, keep on reading.

Without any further ado, here are the steps:

1. Open upLost Ark
2. Go toSettings and then click on theVideo tab

   For the Best Video Settings:

3. Setthe Screen Resolution to 1920 x 1080 or change it according to your monitor’s native resolution
4. Set theScreen Mode to Fullscreen
5. (Optional) Set the Force 21:9 Aspect Ratio to N (YES for players using 21:9 monitors)
6. Set the Lock Cursor to No
7. Set the Screen Brightness to 50% or adjust to your liking

   For the Best Screen Effects Settings:

8. Set the All settings to Custom (There are also presets available)
9. SetTexture Quality to Very High
10. SetShadow Quality to Medium
11. Set Character Quality to Very High
12. Set Particle Quality to Very High
13. Set Anti-Aliasing to High
14. Set Better Depth of Field to Yes
15. Set Indirect Shadows to Yes
16. Set Colorblind Filter based on your personal needs or choice
17. Set Color Filter Intensity based on the Colorblind Filter to your liking
18. Set Auto Optimization to In between

    For Post Processing FX Advanced Settings:

19. Set Bloom Effect to Off
20. Set Flare Effect to Off
21. Set Distortion Effect to Off
22. Set Motion Blur to Off

Lost Ark runs on Unreal Engine 3. Thankfully, the developers made the game well-optimized. A beefy computer is generally not needed to run Lost Ark.

As long as the PC you will be using to play Lost Ark meets the minimum or recommended system requirements, there should be no performance problems to be worried about.

Remember to tone down each of the video settings if your PC is having FPS troubles or other performance issues.

Disable Lost Ark In-Game Chat

Lost Ark has its own remarkable in-game chat system. However, online players usually use other applications such as Discord to communicate with friends or the game’s online community.

With this, the in-game chat is usually useless and causes additional FPS drops according to a post in Reddit. The in-game chat overlay can be disabled by following these 3 easy steps:

1. Click on Chat
2. Select Settings
3. Remove the check on the Area Chat checkbox

Optimize NVIDIA Control Panel Settings

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you can optimize the NVIDIA Control Panel by following these steps:

1. Right-click on Desktop
2. ClickNVIDIA Control Panel
3. Click onAdjust Image Settings with Previewon the left side under 3D Settings
4. Click onUse my preference emphasizing and move the slider toPerformance if it’s not there already
5. Click onApply

Well done! Now, let’s now adjust some settings specific to Lost Ark:

1. Set the Monitor Tech to G-Sync (if that is available)
2. Set the Maximum Pre-rendered Frames to 2
3. Set the Threaded Optimization to On
4. Set the Power Management to Prefer Maximum Performance
5. Set the Texture Filtering Quality to Performance

If you are playing on a laptop, make sure that you have selectedHigh-performance NVIDIA processoras the preferred graphics processor.

Optimize AMD Radeon Settings

If you have an AMD graphics card, then follow these steps to optimize your AMD Radeon settings.

1. OpenAMD Radeon Settings
2. Click on the Gaming tab
3. Click onthe Global Settings
4. Setthe Anti-aliasing Mode toUse application settings
5. Setthe Anti-aliasing Method to Multisampling
6. Set the Morphological Filtering to Off
7. Setthe Anisotropic Filtering Mode to Use application settings
8. Setthe Texture Filtering Quality to Performance
9. Set the Surface Format Optimization to On
10. Set theWait for Vertical Sync to Off
11. Set the OpenGL Triple Buffering to Off
12. Set the Shader Cache to AMD Optimized
13. Set theTessellation Mode to Override application settings
14. Set theMaximum Tessellation Level to Off
15. Set the GPU Workload to Graphics
16. Set the Chill to Off
17. Set the Frame Rate Target Control to Disabled

Disable Windows Update Delivery Optimization

Moving on, here’s a simple trick that will help you free up some resources:

1. Open the Windows Start Menu, enterWindows Update settings and click on the search result for it
2. Click onAdvanced Options
3. Click onDelivery Optimization
4. Make sure that the Allow downloads from other PCs setting is off

Enable Game Mode

Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a setting calledGame Mode that we recommend you turn on. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open the Windows Start Menu
2. TypeGame Mode Settings and press Enter
3. Make sure that the Game Mode option is turned on.

Disable Core Isolation On Windows 11

Windows 11 has a new built-in setting that protects the PC from untrusted third-party applications as well as drivers. The setting is called Core Isolation.

Disabling the setting will not affect anyone who does not download anything from sketchy or untrusted websites.

According to the online community of Lost Ark in Reddit, the performance of the game significantly improved by 20-30 frames per second (FPS) just by disabling the setting.

Disabling Core Isolation is optional. But, here is how you can disable Core Isolation in your PC:

1. Click on the Start Menu button
2. Select Settings
3. Click on Privacy and Security
4. Click on Windows Security
5. Click on Device Security
6. Click on Core Isolation details
7. Turn off the radio button for Memory Integrity

High-Performance Power Plan

You can boost performance by enabling the high-performance power plan on your PC. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Open the Windows start menu
2. Typepowercfg.cpl and press Enter
3. Select theHigh-performance option

Disable OneDrive

We also recommend that you disable OneDrive if you’re not using it. Right-click on the OneDrive icon on your taskbar and click on Exit.

Optimize Discord

If you will not be using the in-game chat system while playing Lost Ark, you are most likely using Discord for team communication or just running it in the background while you are playing solo.

Here are the quick and easy steps to optimize Discord:

1. Open up Discord and click the gear icon to go to theUser Settingspage
2. Click on the Advanced tab and toggle off theHardware Accelerationsetting
3. Click on the Voice & Video tab and scroll to the Video Codec options under Advanced
4. Toggle off the option OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.
5. Toggle off the option H.264 Hardware Acceleration as well.
6. Click on theGame Overlaytab under Activity Settings
7. Make sure thatEnable in-game overlay is toggled off

Note that toggling off some of these settings such as the Hardware Acceleration will require you to relaunch Discord.

Optimizing Google Chrome

If you use Google Chrome, you can turn off hardware acceleration as well. We recommend doing this and here’s how:

1. Open Google Chrome and go to the Settingspage
2. Scroll down to the end and click on the Advancedtab
3. Again, scroll all the way down and make sure that the setting Use hardware acceleration when availableis switched off
4. Make sure that the settingContinue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed is switched off
5. Relaunch Google Chrome

Check Mouse Polling Rate

The polling rate of your mouse is the number of times per second it sends signals and reports its position on the screen to the computer for processing. The majority of gaming mice have a polling rate of 1000 Hz (1 ms). The standard polling rate of conventional mice is usually 125 Hz (8 ms).

Gaming mice are generally faster and have a higher polling rate than conventional mice. It allows smoother movement and better, faster response times in games which is important for competitive play.

However, the online gaming community of Lost Ark in Reddit found that having a higher polling rate, more than 500 Hz can elicit stuttering issues in Lost Ark. Fortunately, fixing this problem is easy.

Most gaming mice, especially branded ones, have included software that can be downloaded and installed into your PC to change mouse settings including polling rate. Examples of this software are Logitech G HUG for Logitech G gaming mice and Razer Synapse for Razer gaming mice.

Open up the software that is compatible with your mouse and find the setting for polling rate and change the speed accordingly.

Move The Game To An SSD

Lost Ark is a big game that requires 50+ GB of free storage space. You might be thinking that installing Lost Ark into a hard disc drive (HDD) is better since it needs a lot of storage space.

Installing the game into an HDD is not recommended. We suggest that the game be moved to a solid-state drive (SSD) to get faster loading times and overall improved performance if there is an available SSD in your system with 50+ GB of free storage space.

Check For Signs Of Overheating

Since Lost Ark requires intensive processing from both CPU and GPU, it is important to check for any signs of hardware overheating. Overheating causes performance issues with any computer, especially when using heavy applications such as games.

Here are some of the common signs of overheating:

• Loud and weird fan sounds
• Always encountering the blue screen of death
• The PC constantly shuts down or reboots
• Some CPUs that are not fan-based such as liquid-cooling can also experience overheating, check for coolant leakage
• Above the usual high temperature
• Your computer sounds like it has a jet engine and might lift off at any moment

Scan For Malware

Some malware or computer viruses can also cause performance issues when it comes to using heavy applications such as when playing games. Though, it usually depends on the purpose and type of malware.

The most important symptom is high resource usage (CPU and GPU) even when the computer is idle. Thus, booting up any game can have some bottleneck issues in processing since the malware is already using the processing power of both CPU and GPU.

We recommend that you scan your computer using your anti-virus or anti-malware software to ensure that there is no malware that can cause performance issues when playing Lost Ark.

Conclusion

That is the end of the guide! Hopefully, you followed and implemented the tips and tricks in this guide to have a wonderful and lag-free time playing Lost Ark.

You might also be dealing with network lag or high ping. In that case, we recommend checking out this guide on how to reduce ping in all games.

Also, since Lost Ark is very CPU-intensive as well as graphics-intensive, you can look into investing in a new and faster processor or even the latest graphics card. Investing in more RAM as well if you have an extra budget can also help in improving the performance of the game.

If you have any other questions, here is the Frequently Asked Questions page found on the official website of Lost Ark. Good luck and have fun!