‘UE 5.7 Is Close to a Magic Bullet’ for Performance, Says ARK Developer, Though It Won’t Fully Eliminate Stutters

[UPDATE - January 5, 2026] Jeremy Stieglitz didn't just talk about performance; our full interview is now live. Beyond the technical "magic bullet" of UE 5.7, we discuss the 1,000-year lore bridge, the development of Lost Colony, and the roadmap leading to the primitive reset of ARK 2. Read the full transcript here.

[UPDATE - January 3, 2026] We have published the second part of the interview with Jeremy Stieglitz, where he reveals that UE 5.7 is instrumental (although not quite enough on its own) for the studio's work-in-progress port of ARK: Survival Ascended to the Nintendo Switch 2.

[ORIGINAL STORY] When Epic Games launched Unreal Engine 5.7 (UE 5.7 from now on in this article) a month and a half ago, it immediately appeared to be a significant improvement in various regards, at least on paper. The addition of Nanite foliage, although experimental, was very exciting, while the MegaLights feature promised to increase the number of dynamic shadow-casting lights that developers could add to their games without crashing the frame rate.

Last week, YouTuber MxBenchmarkPC tested UE 5.7 against UE 5.4 in a Venice-set tech demo and noticed measurable performance gains. Would these additions and changes still be equally beneficial in an actual game, though?

I got an answer to that question from Studio Wildcard Co-Founder, Co-Creative Director, Lead Designer, Lead Programmer, and Development Director Jeremy Stieglitz, as part of a much larger interview on ARK: Survival Ascended and its recently released narrative-driven Lost Colony DLC.

When I asked him what had changed in the reception of ARK: Survival Ascended since the early access launch two years ago, with recent user reviews finally reaching Mostly Positive on Steam, he pointed out the performance improvements as a major reason. Then, he revealed that UE 5.7 is already being tested internally, is expected to be released in March 2026, and is 'as close to a magic bullet' in delivering better performance as one can imagine, particularly with the Nanite foliage.

Jeremy Stieglitz: When the game came out, it didn't run very well. It still doesn't run as well as it should, frankly, but we're up about 50% performance-wise over the initial release of the game on the same hardware. It's a really significant improvement, but it's not ultimately where we want to be. Where are we going to get more performance from? Well, a big part of it is actually with Epic's latest version of Unreal Engine 5.7, which introduces some serious new performance-oriented improvements and systems. 5.6 did as well, and we're still on 5.5. So, the performance improvements of 5.6 combined with the new features of 5.7 are going to gain us about another 30 to 40% on both the GPU and the CPU. UE 5.6 did a lot of render thread optimizations, where they made things work much better in parallel between the render thread and the game thread and the GPU and the CPU. There's major architectural changes in 5.6, and in UE 5.7, they added an entirely new system for how to draw large foliage, demonstrated in The Witcher IV demo, for example.

And we're actually able to utilize that directly. We have this working internally. We are just still preparing it for release. It's going to take a few months to work all the kinks out of other parts of the engine that have been upgraded, but we can already say that it's about a third performance gain on our existing maps due to the use of this new Nanite tesselation and culling system that Epic has introduced in UE 5.7 for foliage. We're really, really excited about that. It's as close to a magic bullet as you're going to get at this point, and it's one of those rare cases where it's an unalloyed win. There's no real caveats or asterisks. It works way better than what existed before, and we don't have to sacrifice anything to make it work. So, it was as close to a magic solution for some of those performance problems as possible. We expect the UE 5.7 upgrade for ARK: Survival Ascended to roll out by the end of March of this coming year.

When I asked whether UE 5.7 would help get rid of the dreadful stuttering that gamers have to suffer in ARK but also generally in Unreal Engine games, Stieglitz replied that it would, but players shouldn't expect stutters to be entirely gone.

Jeremy Stieglitz: It should be better, but I don't know that it will be completely eliminated because of two factors. One, in ARK in particular, some of the stuttering is due to the initiation of actors which cannot be multi-threaded. When you are playing an online game and you go to a new area and a giant base that somebody has built gets loaded on the client, it really has to be done instantaneously as soon as we get that data. We could possibly try to multi-thread it, but Unreal Engine 5 is pretty bad about network actor instantiation and multi-threading. I don't know if they have an inherent system for that. In other words, when the client receives an actor like a dino or a building over the network, it wants to immediately spawn that to start receiving the network data associated with it immediately. Now, multiply that by 50,000. When you've got 50,000 structures that you've got to spawn and you receive them in a big batch of data all in a single frame, as you can imagine, that's going to result in a hitch. It has nothing to do with graphics or background loading of the world. It's literally that it just received 50,000 game objects over the network and needs to prepare them for play because it's about to receive network data associated with them.

That's part of the stuttering that's unique to ARK. That's probably the main stuttering people receive when they're playing online, especially associated with large bases. There's another kind of stuttering that's more associated with background loading of the world. A lot of that's been eliminated in more recent versions of Unreal Engine and smoothed out, but there's one that I think is somewhat particular to Unreal games in general that it relates to shader caching. We don't do pre-shader caching, so I think it has to generate some shader code on the fly from the kind of intermediate shader code that's HLSL basically and it has to prepare it for uploading to the GPU, and I believe it does that on the fly. It's specific to your GPU hardware, and that can result in stalls. The way a lot of Unreal games can eliminate that and do is they pre-cache all the shaders they can for your hardware on startup. The issue why I don't like doing that with ARK is that we've just got so much content that I don't think it would be practical in terms of how long it would take. And the second thing is we also do modding, which makes it even more unpredictable what kind of materials and shaders we're going to need to compile.

In practice, I think the modding would make it very ineffective even if we did it for the base game content. There would still be stalls due to that because, for one thing, when you play online we do allow people to create custom cosmetics. It's an option people can turn off, but by default, those get downloaded dynamically to people as they play. So, you can encounter people with arbitrary cosmetics on their character or their bases as you play the game. And those can have completely unique materials and therefore unique shaders. There's no real way to pre-cache those because we don't know what they are in advance. I think over time Epic might be able to thread those things even better than they are now, but I do think that hitching in a game which doesn't pre-compile all the shaders is always going to exist to some extent. I will say that I think it's gotten a lot better since the earlier versions of Unreal Engine 5 to UE 5.7 and I wouldn't be surprised to see continued improvements there as Epic continues to iterate on the engine. For our part, we expect to do at least one major engine upgrade per year going forward. We found that we got a good sense of how to do it reasonably efficiently with our upgrade from 5.2 to 5.5 last year in June. We'll do it again to UE 5.7 in March, which we've already begun on, and then wherever Epic is with the version in early to mid 2027 as well.

The full interview with Stieglitz has a lot more details on performance enhancements and on ARK: Survival Ascended as a whole, including its roadmap all the way to ARK 2 (now tentatively slated for 2028). Look forward to its publication soon.

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