The game in itself is not hard do you play PvE or PvP. Try PvE and stay on the beach for a bit and get setup with some good stuff like a pteranodon then venture off. A good place safe place to build after is the waterfall by green tower

Naa ARK does have alot of performance issues I own a MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V GPU and it well comes under the requirements to run ARK I get 40ish FPS (On full settings) with spikes. I have tried turning down things like ground clutter that adds nothing to the game and it doesnt change my FPS at all.