[BUG] - Massive lag and stuttering since 1.4 patch ...

SirAndy · September 2014

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Ever since the 1.4 patch, i get massive lag and stuttering in both PvE and PvP.

There's a stutter that completely locks my movement every other second and there is a general lag in responsiveness to any of my inputs.

Before the patch, i would get a steady 60 fps pretty much anywhere. Now it mostly between 15 and 30, if i'm lucky.

Something ain't right!

DeathDealer19 · September 2014

Yeah im experiencing the same issue. I am by no means running a monster pc but I never had issues doing pve content. Since update 4, ive tried both Dragonstar and Craglorn trials and im lagging terribly. Its not my connection ive done tests and my connection has not changed. Ive turned all graphics to low and does not fix. I don't seem to lag at all in 4 man delves, but when I attempted Dragonstar and Hel Ra today, it was unplayable. If there is a known issue, id love to know with an eta on a fix. Ive run a repair on my client, I have nothing else running aside from teamspeak on occasion, Antivirus and firewalls are both off completely.

Probitas · September 2014

If the same server for the game is the same server for updates, then this could be the cause.

Paske · September 2014

Try turining particle effects down in options.

Also water, shadows, and view distance.

But particle effects would be my bet.

SirAndy · September 2014

I have a purpose build gaming rig with all the bells and whistles you can think of.

Before update 1.4, i ran a steady 60fps on ULTRA settings.

Now after update 1.4 it's chop chop chop lag chop lag lag lag chop ...

Nothing (and i mean NOTHING) has changed on my setup since Sunday. NOTHING.

Elsonso · September 2014

Double check your video settings in the game. Remember that these were all reset accidentally.

SirAndy · September 2014

lordrichter wrote: »

Double check your video settings in the game. Remember that these were all reset accidentally.

@lordrichter

I do have a backup of my INI files that i made before the patch. I'll run a compare on those, good call!

babylon · September 2014

lordrichter wrote: »

Double check your video settings in the game. Remember that these were all reset accidentally.

Video settings weren't reset, only thing different after the patch was the new settings for particle effects (which were defaulted to lowest setting).

Elsonso · September 2014

I am not sure what changes may have been made to the Video settings. I know that I normally run with AA turned off but when I was checking my settings yesterday it was turned on. My first thought was that the patch reset the video settings to the default values, but it is possible that this was changed a long time ago and I never had a reason to look.

Frenkthevile · September 2014

i play with the same FPS...and the overall quality seems better to me; check your options, maybe they're changed.

Kvothe · September 2014

I am having the exact same issue as the op since the patch. I have tried running without mods, and running the repair, but nothing has helped so far. I may try removing all my Saved Variables, AddOnSettings.txt, and UserSettings.txt just to see what happens.

staxjax · September 2014

Game runs better for me in PVE but I cant pvp at all with 600+ms ping. In open world I get 50+ fps all the time now, usually above 60 fps (dungeons/solo instance are always above 80 fps) I noticed more cores on my cpu are being used now...fx8350 with hd7870. I have been getting some stutter on occasion in busy towns, but I think it is because view distance set to 100 and forced max texture rendering. I turn down view distance and it will go away, or if I turn down texture quality with game ui...but I really don't like the texture pop-in so I force always max texture quality with UserSettings.

babylon · September 2014

staxjax wrote: »

I have been getting some stutter on occasion in busy towns, but I think it is because view distance set to 100 and forced max texture rendering.

No the town area fps drop has nothing to do with other players, seems to be some kind of weirdness just because it's a town - if you go into an instanced town area (like when doing a quest) and there are no other players at all (it being instanced to you) the fps is exactly the same as when you're in the real version of that town (in towns you see much lower fps than you get when in any other/non-town area that has buildings etc).

Something is weird with towns, and it isn't other players.

Csub · September 2014

For me, the performance improved in general but I did get some odd fps drops occasionally when I entered a different area in a zone etc.but I did a defragmentation while sleeping so hopefully it is fixed. Have you tried doing that? Patches fragment the game and harddrive a lot.

Martinus72 · September 2014

Csub wrote: »

For me, the performance improved in general but I did get some odd fps drops occasionally when I entered a different area in a zone etc.but I did a defragmentation while sleeping so hopefully it is fixed. Have you tried doing that? Patches fragment the game and harddrive a lot.

Don't bother with defragmentation and install ESO on SSD instead. Improvement guaranteed

Baphomet · September 2014

I've only been to Cyrodiil and Craglorn after the patch, and I can confirm that Craglorn is lagging me as well - despite having 75+ frames per sec.

It's the same kind of stuttering mentioned above.

Rhazmuz · September 2014

Baphomet wrote: »

I've only been to Cyrodiil and Craglorn after the patch, and I can confirm that Craglorn is lagging me as well - despite having 75+ frames per sec.

It's the same kind of stuttering mentioned above.

Same for me..

Guess its a case of "she canee take the strain capt'n" due to so many players in old Craggie

MarRyb · September 2014

Same thing with fps drops in my case. Random drops from 60 to 20-25fps no matter where you are (mostly cities), when /reloadui I'm back at 60fps again, but back at 25 after few minutes. It looks like particle system is improving nothing in my case as I tried Cyrodiil today, and the performance there is same as 1.3, big fights like 15-20fps. Even if I'm standing next to the wayshrine doing nothing I get major random fps drops.

During fight in PvE I get nice 40fps but again when I use ability like Standard of Might I get bloody 12fps. I had fps drops like this before 1.4 but this is really bad, I cannot use this ability anymore.

They need to fix this as it is really annoying.

Edit: I'm on the NA server

mra4nii · September 2014

FPS for me is the same as before. But i have this stuttering, less(mostly in towns) when new PFX settings are at minimum. When i set them to maximum, it happens every few seconds, no matters in what area i am. Even inside the buildings.
None of my old settings are changed(ULTRA/custom).

babylon · September 2014

Martinus72 wrote: »

Don't bother with defragmentation and install ESO on SSD instead. Improvement guaranteed

SSD does nothing for this game. An SSD is great, but this game does not benefit from an SSD at all.

In my case with my computer (GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC ACX | i7-2600K @4.6GHz | ASUS P8Z68-V | Samsung 850 Pro 3D V-NAND SSD | 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X DDR3 1600MHz), the ONLY thing that helps is setting view distance down to like 20. Can max every other setting (including the two new particle settings) and have 100fps at 1080, but for view distance.

Sideline · September 2014

I'm also getting the video stuttering since 1.4, never had a problem before. I've toggled off every graphic option, reduced the overall quality from ultra to high, ran the repair tool, updated my drivers and disabled all add ons - nothing has helped.

It is much worse in cities, I don't know if it's because of the buildings or the higher number of player models running around.

Edit for below: NA megaserver.

babylon · September 2014

Sideline wrote: »

It is much worse in cities, I don't know if it's because of the buildings or the higher number of player models running around.

I can confirm it definitely has nothing to do with the players, as I found city fps is the same whether the city is instanced and with only you in it, or is the real city and has people everywhere.

ZOS_GinaBruno · September 2014

Hey guys, can you let us know which megaserver you're playing on?

twev · September 2014

Martinus72 wrote: »

Csub wrote: »

For me, the performance improved in general but I did get some odd fps drops occasionally when I entered a different area in a zone etc.but I did a defragmentation while sleeping so hopefully it is fixed. Have you tried doing that? Patches fragment the game and harddrive a lot.

Don't bother with defragmentation and install ESO on SSD instead. Improvement guaranteed

I run a Samsung 840 EVO SSD.
I run Win7/64, with 16 gig. [I know it's a 32 bit game restricted to <4 gig ram, I'm just stipulating that I'm not trying to run on 2 gig of ram.]
This is a dedicated gaming rig. The only other game on the system has been installed since before ESO was released.
I have an R9-270 vid card. I always check for driver updates. There haven't been any new drivers since 3 weeks after the game was released, so drivers haven't changed since then. And drivers couldn't update since then.
I get stutter, now, since the ESO update, that didn't occur in the weeks before this update right up until the ESO servers came down for the 1.4.3 update.
The stutter occurs approximately every 1-3 minutes and lasts for 5-15 seconds per instance.
The stutter occurs, for example, while I'm walking down a road in Grahtwood, alone, with no interaction with NPCs.... so it's not an 'in town' or 'in combat', or 'in a crowd' issue for me.

This getting old, fast.

ers101284b14_ESO · September 2014

I'm on NA and my FPS has dropped considerably. Back when other people where complaining about getting 2 FPS in Cyrodill I was getting about 45 in PVP and 50 in towns, 75 out of towns, and 100 in instances, now I dip all the way down to 19 fps up to 80 no matter where I am. It is very random and not steady at all.

zazamalek · September 2014

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey guys, can you let us know which megaserver you're playing on?

@‌ZOS_GinaBruno EU. FPS in PvE has improved, FPS in PvP has deteriorated. As for lag:

Personal experience:

Server performance has been progressively deteriorating since the move the Frankfurt.
It started in PvP and is now affecting PvE.
Current situation (PvE):
- 30 second rollbacks at least once or twice a night.
- Teleporting NPCs, also once or twice.
- Some zones (non-VR Shadowfen is particularly bad) worse than others.
- At times a perceived 2 second delay between pressing an ability and it firing.
Current situation (PvP):
- The entire battle freezes at least once every 1 hour. Everyone on the map (without exception, so far as we can tell) experiences this. Everything then fast-forwards to the correct location/updated positions. In crazy 3 way fights this can happen as frequently as every 10 minutes.
- At times skill lag of up to 2 seconds is experienced. This is not universal lag, but is experienced at the same time by more than one person (in different locations/countries).
- On occasion an ability simply does not fire, even if spammed after it doesn't work.
- A full campaign exaggerates the issue, but a practically empty one (Chillrend, 1 bar, all alliances, no active AOE zergs) still experiences these issues - albeit with less frequency.
Issues are apparent even immediately after a hive/megaserver reset.
None of these issues were experienced when the servers were in NA, even though NA is further (in terms of ping) from me. Given that evidence, I'm going to eliminate network issue from my side.

Guild experience:

Mixed bag.
Some claim that they never have lag, everything works perfectly, 100% of the time (even though they live in the same country as me).
Others claim the same issues as me (even though they reside in or very close to Germany).
Seems more are having problems, although those people would tend to be louder about their experiences - so it might be a skewed statistic.

PvP is particularly frustrating at the moment for a lot of the players that I know.

You guys sure that some smartie isn't farming bitcoins or something on your shiny new hardware? :P

kitsinni · September 2014

I had the same issue. I completely reloaded the game and it seems to be better but I have not really had a chance to test it for long. Repair didn't work, changing settings didn't work, disable addons didn't work, turning off all effects didn't work, updating the graphics card driver didn't work.

kitsinni · September 2014

Mine actually was on an SSD when I reloaded it I reloaded it to an HD if that helps.

It was NA server.

heavy_artillery · September 2014

I have ESO on its own SSD, was having lag/freeze-frame and disconnect problems prior to that and moving it helped, but since this weeks Update I have been experiencing lag issues that *almost* make the game unplayable.

I had been reading about a memory leak that was causing some of the problems but thought it had been addressed and fixed. Could that be rearing its ugly head again?

Telling people who run high-end PCs that play games (usually without lag) on High or Ultra video settings and at high (50+) frame rates to "turn down X" doesn't make any sense. I have the rig I have specifically because I can play at those settings and a defect in the game's code or a problem with their servers isn't reason for me to have to degrade the quality of my experience.

I hope they figure out what's causing the problems and get them fixed server side.

ZOS_GinaBruno · September 2014

Ok, thanks everyone. We're going to dig into this now.

pppontus · September 2014

In the interest of giving a little more input:

We had 4 people doing Dragonstar Arena yesterday and one of them were affected by this intermittently, seemed to get better after a restart but after a short time it was back again. The other 3 didn't notice anything, our experience was one of the most smooth we've had in the game even. This is on EU where other random lag has been quite common lately (but then affecting everyone in the zone).

The person affected is running on a high end Nvidia graphics card (780?), 32(!) GB of RAM, SSD - basically a top tier new gaming PC.

Hope this helps.