Does your game keep crashing and pop-up with a window saying Fatal error and a bunch of numbers and words? You may spend many hair-pulling hours trying to fix the error but failed. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one that suffers from this issue. While the content below provides you methods that help you fix the crash.
Try these methods:
There’re 6 fixes that have helped many gamers solve their crash problem. You don’t need to try them all, just work your way down and find the one that works for you.
- Verify integrity of game files
- Turn off the Steam game overlay
- Lower the pings value
- Update your graphics driver
- Update your game
- Disable hardware acceleration in your browser
Method 1: Verify integrity of game files
Verify integrity of game files is a simple but useful fix for Steam games. Broken and missing files can cause the fatal error. This fix can redownload files to fix crashes.
- Run Steam.
- In the LIBRARY, find Ark and right-click on the game, then click Properties.
- In the LOCAL FILES tab, click Verify Integrity of Game Files…
- Close Steam and relaunch Ark. You should be good to go.
Method 2: Turn off the Steam game overlay
The Steam overlay is a piece of Steam user interface that can let users access friend list, web browser and in-game DLC purchasing. This feature is very useful but sometimes it can be the reason for the fatal error. You can disable it and check whether it could solve the error.
- Run Steam.
- In the LIBRARY, find Ark and right-click on the game, then click Properties.
- In the General tab, uncheck Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game.
- Close Steam and relaunch Ark. Check if the error will appear or not.
Method 3: Lower the pings value
The Ark Fatal Error can be affected by the pings value. You can lower pings value to solve the problem. Here’s how:
- Run Steam and click Steam on the left-toper corner.
- Click Settings.
- Choose the In-Game tab and find In-Game server browser: Max pings/ minute.
- Choose a lower value in the drop-down menu.
- Click OK.
- Close Steam and relaunch Ark. You should be good to go.
Method 4: Update your graphics driver
It is possible that the Ark Fatal Error is caused by driver issues. If you’re using the wrong graphics card driver or the driver is out of date, you may meet this problem. In addition to solving this problem, updating drivers can also improve your computer performance.
There are two ways to update your drivers:
Option 1 – Manually – You’ll need some computer skills and patience to update your drivers this way, because you need to find exactly the right the driver online, download it and install it step by step.
OR
Option 2 – Automatically (Recommended)– This is the quickest and easiest option. It’s all done with just a couple of mouse clicks – easy even if you’re a computer newbie.
Option 1 – Download and install the driver manually
To get the latest driver, you need to go to the manufacturer website, find the drivers corresponding with your specific flavor of Windows version (for example, Windows 32 bit) and download the driver manually.
Once you’ve downloaded the correct drivers for your system, double-click on the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions to install the driver.
Option 2 – Automatically update video card drivers
If you don’t have the time, patience or computer skills to update your drivers manually, you can do it automatically with Driver Easy.
Driver Easy will automatically recognize your system and find the correct drivers for it. You don’t need to know exactly what system your computer is running, you don’t need to risk downloading and installing the wrong driver, and you don’t need to worry about making a mistake when installing.
You can update your drivers automatically with either the FREE or the Pro version of Driver Easy. But with the Pro version it takes just 2 clicks (and you get full support and a 30-day money back guarantee):
- Download and install Driver Easy.
- Run Driver Easy and click Scan Now button. Driver Easy will then scan your computer and detect any problem drivers.
- Click the Update button next to the driver to automatically download and install the correct version of this driver (you can do this with Free version). Or click Update All to automatically download and install the correct version of all the drivers that are missing or out of date on your system (this requires the Pro version – you’ll be prompted to upgrade when you click Update All).
- Run Ark to check the problem is resolved or not.
Method 5: Update your game
If you haven’t been updating your Ark for a while, you can try updating the game to fix the problem. The latest version may fix the crashing problem for you.
Method 6: Disable hardware acceleration in your browser
If the above methods can’t help and you have web browsers running in the background while running Ark, you can try to turn off the hardware acceleration and test your game. It’s because the browser would share GPU resources with the game which could cause crashes.
Here we take Google Chrome as an example.
- Run Google Chrome.
- Click the three dots button in the right-upper corner and click Settings.
- Scroll down and click Advanced.
- Under System, turn off Use hardware acceleration when available.
- Run Ark to check whether the crash will appear or not.
We hope you find the above information helpful. And if you have any ideas, suggestions, or questions, feel free to leave a comment below.