Two major things have happened and I am not sure which, if either, is the reason I am having so much trouble.
First, I took a break from ARK around Thanksgiving because of the holiday and then the new Rainbow Six game came out. I do not know what patch may have come out between The end of November and the first week of December. I have had patches that made it impossible for me to load the game before, but I am still having this issue a week later...
Second, I upgraded video cards. I got a less than a year old 780Ti from my brother, in exchange for my 780 that is about two years old. My 780 played the game just fine and I had no trouble, though as I mentioned above, I have had random patch issues that were resolved in a patch or quick fix in a day or so. They are similar cards using similar drivers. I popped my old one out and new one in and had no problems with any other games.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled ARK. I have uninstalled and resinstalled drivers. I have removed and added GeForce Experience, as well. I have run several benchmarking tools, because that is what you do when you get a better video card (duh). Heaven, Valley, 3D Mark for that sick Fire score. A lot of these things putting as much, if not more pressure on the card than ARK does.
I have done everything short of reinstalling Windows. Every other game works fine. The card is not overclocked, because I just hadn't got that far yet. I have monitors my PSU and have not seen anything weird, either. The card doesn't get too hot (not even close to the throttle point). I have run FurMark loops with no issue.
I don't get any extra info when the game crashes. I get the generic video driver crashed, so ARK has crashed error. I am completely out of ideas at this point. I have Googled and checked the internet and I haven't been able to find this kind of issue, yet. Another person is having what sounds like a similar crash, but does not included very much info and got zero responses.
Any ideas are welcome. "lulz omg alpha = alpha" is not helpful. Specs below.
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Classified
CPU Intel Core i5-4670K @ 4.40GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR3 - 1600MHz
Driver: Game Ready 359.06
OS: Windows 10