ARK: Survival Ascended Gets A Surprise Steam Deck Verified Badge, but it Shouldn't Have.

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Update from Oliver Stogden: Unlike Noah, I already own the game, so I decided to quickly boot the game and test to see if improvements had been made. Sadly, performance is very far from playable, with framerates under 20 FPS in dense jungle areas in the game, even on the lowest settings with FSR 3 on Ultra Performance. The game should stay as Unsupported, and you definitely should not purchase ARK: Survival Ascended to play on the Steam Deck.

Original Article:

There are so many games that get the Verified badge, and there are always some that make me do a double-take. Yesterday, there was another new Verified game that made me double-take. Years ago, I remember playing ARK: Survival Evolved and being stunned at the scope and visuals. However, it was a very demanding game, and its newest version, ARK: Survival Ascended, is as well. However, the game just got its Steam Deck Verified badge, and I am a little stunned.

Yesterday, ARK: Survival Ascended got the Steam Deck Verified badge, which stunned me a bit. This is up from the Unsupported rating it had originally, which I felt was more appropriate for a game as demanding as this. This means Valve has noted it has solid controller support, shows the correct icons, has legible in-game text, and a good default graphical configuration.

I don't have the new version of the game for myself, so I can't test it out just yet, but I find it a little difficult to believe. The game is asking for a pretty powerful GPU compared to what the Deck is offering, asking for an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT or NVIDIA GeForce 1080 at minimum. I would consider the GeForce 1060 to already be pushing it for playability on the Deck, so going over to 1080 is pretty big.

Still, as I haven't tested it yet, I can't say for sure whether its playable. Older reports on ProtonDB noted it would dip to 25 FPS, but could be considered generally playable. It's still surprising to me to see it have the Verified badge, so take it with a grain of salt. It's nice to see the green checkmark regardless, and I look forward to trying it out for myself as soon as I purchase the game.

ARK: Survival Ascended is available for $44.99 on Steam.

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