ESO core usage?

Paulington

Hi all.

I too am suffering from serious FPS drops and crazy symptoms like stuttering. Sometimes I am at 144 FPS and get stuttering even though my FPS remains unchanged (according to Afterburner) and other times I go from 144 FPS to 5 FPS and rebound back up. AoE fights are like a slideshow.

As an example, please see this YouTube video of me in Sanctum Ophidia. Pre-patch I got 100+ FPS through this dungeon constantly with no FPS drops or stuttering. Now the entire dungeon is like this. It happens whether we are fighting two mobs or twenty, ESO engages slideshow mode.

I ran MSI Afterburner to do some logging and found that ESO is utilizing GPU1 to 50-80% and GPU2 at exactly 13% regardless of my FPS. Whether I have 144 FPS or 10 FPS, it is always the same utilisation.

I believe the reason for this is that whilst my CPU has six cores and 12 logical cores, ESO is using one core to 90-100% every single second I am playing the game no matter what my FPS is and I am unsure if this is a symptom or a cause but it is likely related. When I go into AoE fights one CPU core spikes to 100%, I go into slideshow mode and it stays at 100% until the AoE is gone. I must re-iterate that this is a new issue that I've only had since release of the IC.

I have tried setting my Video settings from the absolute maximum to the absolute minimum and it makes not one single iota of difference. I still get one CPU core at 100%, insane stuttering and FPS drops like crazy. This happens both with and without addons. It is also not a PC issue as no other game has this issue.

For relevance, here is my DXDiag.txt.

Please ZOS, please revert whatever changes you made that cause this issue. Trials are unplayable, PvP is unbearable, my DPS suffers because I go 1-2 seconds between frames and I die constantly in fights like The Serpent because by the time I see the World-Shaper it is milliseconds from exploding and I can't escape.

If there's anything else I can provide to help you fix this issue, don't hesitate to ask.

Paulington

For the sake of brevity, I will post my PC specs here so my DxDiag.txt doesn't need to be read.

CPU: Intel i7-4930k 4.5GHz 6-Core.

GPU: 2x MSI GeForce GTX 780 in SLi.

RAM: 16GB G.Skill DDR3.

MOBO: ASRock X79 Extreme4.

PSU: SuperFlower Leadex Platinum 1kW.

STORAGE: ESO is on a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD.

SLy_Kyti

I have 8 cores. ESo uses one. I don't use my SLi with it either. Also I downgraded my Nvidia drivers to Junes release for stability.
The Game engine is just crappola.

Paulington

SLy_Kyti wrote: »

I have 8 cores. ESo uses one. I don't use my SLi with it either. Also I downgraded my Nvidia drivers to Junes release for stability.
The Game engine is just crappola.

Yes, I am aware the engine is terrible. But I have logs from last year and it shows ESO barely using 50-60% of one core regardless of GPU utilisation. Something has changed.

It has to be related, a core can't do any more work if it's at 100% utilisation. The CPU is bottlenecking like crazy here which is normal for MMOs but when it is sudden after a patch and seemingly widespread, something is up.

SirAndy

I have 4 cores (8 virtual) and when ESO is running OK, it uses one core to about 80% and 3 others around 15%.

Whenever i get the stutter/freeze and my FPS drops below 10 the one CPU that was previously at around 80% goes up to 100% and stays maxed there.

My best guess would be one or more threads are not programmed to yield processor resources to the OS every other frame or get into a state where the yield is bypassed.

A simple usleep(1000) during a tight loop (rendering or otherwise) would do wonders for keeping cores responsive.
I would also suggest using SetProcessAffinityMask() in each thread to ensure a better load spread between cores.

Elf_Boy

I am back after a break.

In the past, when I checked while ESO was running I would see all my cores in use, though I did not check processor affinity or any specifics, ESO was the only demanding application the times I checked.

I will be checking again. Having pretty much everything running on one thread, is not good, as we all know. I hope this is temporary behaviour.

I have my own ESO performance issue, but will post my own thread as it is different, though may have the same root cause which is why I am reading this thread.

SirAndy

Ok, so i caught ESO in the act last night.

When running normally:
- 4 cores (out of 8) are utilized. The 1st core is at about 80% and the other 3 around 15%.

When FPS drop and stuttering begins:
- 1st core drops down below 5% while one of the 3 that were at 15% goes up to 100% and stays there.

@ZOS_GinaBruno
My most likely explanation is that one of the supporting threads gets in a state where it locks up in a tight loop, eating 100% of the core it is running on while the main thread on the 1st core is waiting for that thread to respond, which is why the 1st core drops down to almost nothing.

tyronebarreb17_ESO

I have had similar issues with my overclocked i5. Ive been using a 4.6ghz stable overclock for nearly a year now but since the imperial patch my processor has just started freezing at various load levels. During gameplay, all 4 cores appear to be used as they all show varying load levels but as the OP stated, 1 core does appear to do much more work than the rest.

I know when its about to happen because I get what the OP described, FPS drops to around 5 fps and the game starts to stutter and if it doesn't recover quick my processor load levels just lock in place. When this happens I can alt tab out of the game but whole computer freezes within 15 seconds and a hard reset is required.

I reverted back to stock processor/motherboard settings and this seemed to eliminate the problem though I didn't test that extensively as running the game at a turbo speed of 3.7ghz had a serious impact on in-game fps so ive crept back up to a 4.5 ghz overclock and so far, touch wood ive had no lock ups.

I think overclock or not is possibly irrelevant to this issue, the heavy focus on the usage of a single core does appear to be an issue

omegatay_ESO

When ZOS was founded back in 2007 to make this game there was 4 core processors and more. Was total fail that they coded a game around 1 cpu core, single video cards. Total fail, and honestly, baffling.

Paulington

Just to add some more information in a visible format.



What strikes me is how variable my FPS is. For this test I disabled SLI.

Please @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_JessicaFolsom, get someone on this issue and try to replicate what causes it or at least give us some information.

Hookgrin

Paulington wrote: »

Hi all.

... my CPU has six cores and 12 logical cores, ESO is using one core to 90-100% every single second I am playing the game...

Same here.

ESO.exe shows only about 9-15% CPU usage, but that is of the 12 CPUs. If you watch the graph of the maxed out CPU and quit ESO to the desktop, that maxed CPU goes all the way down to 0. The only time you see it spread to multiple threads is during loading screens. After the loading screen, those threads end and the core's CPU maxes again.

While it shows that ESO.exe's affinity is set to all CPU's, the core of the game is clearly only designed to use 1.

For those folks with 4 or less logical CPUs, ESO is in direct competition with all of the background tasks that share more and more of the percentage of the CPU the fewer CPUs you have. Performance must really suffer.

Performance can really improve for everyone with a few changes in coding to allow multi-threading.

I submitted this as a /bug with a screenshot of Resource Monitor's CPU graphs some time ago.

alakmir

Download anti malware and run a full scan of ur PC . Mostly, malwares in ur pc cause u stuttering in games . I was having the same problem and now it is fixed by doing the same .

tplink3r1

Not sure what might be causing that, at least mine is using all 4 cores.
http://oi59.tinypic.com/20paijr.jpg
edit: Im using an i5 4690k @4.5Ghz

slaweqkeb17_ESO

Disabling HT may help a bit here, other than that we'll need to wait for devs to get it fixed.

Skorol007

what is HT?

Duck

Skorol007 wrote: »

what is HT?

Hyper-threading

Kronuxx

I really do hope ZOS and @ZOS_GinaBruno take a look at this thread.

Kronuxx

tyronebarreb17_ESO wrote: »

I have had similar issues with my overclocked i5. Ive been using a 4.6ghz stable overclock for nearly a year now but since the imperial patch my processor has just started freezing at various load levels. During gameplay, all 4 cores appear to be used as they all show varying load levels but as the OP stated, 1 core does appear to do much more work than the rest.

I know when its about to happen because I get what the OP described, FPS drops to around 5 fps and the game starts to stutter and if it doesn't recover quick my processor load levels just lock in place. When this happens I can alt tab out of the game but whole computer freezes within 15 seconds and a hard reset is required.

I reverted back to stock processor/motherboard settings and this seemed to eliminate the problem though I didn't test that extensively as running the game at a turbo speed of 3.7ghz had a serious impact on in-game fps so ive crept back up to a 4.5 ghz overclock and so far, touch wood ive had no lock ups.

I think overclock or not is possibly irrelevant to this issue, the heavy focus on the usage of a single core does appear to be an issue

I've been having the same exact issue as you. Computer locks up and freezes. I did notice that it will happen almost every single time when I exit the game. Although my cpu is OC'd to 4.5 GHz, I know that this is not the issue. I've stress tested my OC settings multiple times with no issues. I've played what would seem to be other demanding games (i.e. Witcher 3) with no issues. I seriously hope they will improve the code of this game.

Necrelios

I believe this is a bug related to the buffering support they may have added to address the screen tearing issues at launch. It does not appear to be settings related and when it happens you can logout to the character select and spin your character around and still see the same choppy frame rate very noticeably.

It happens very randomly as well, you can play for 12 hours and never see it happen, or it can happen right after first logging in. It can't be manually reproduced. When this occurs it sometimes goes away after a few minutes, but it will always be back unless you completely exit the client and restart the game.

It does not appear to be caused by a client memory leak. The client consumes the usual amount of memory and has a consistent number of threads as usual. Neither is it Network or Disk Read related. Whatever is happening is on the GPU side of things, I suspect a broken pipe to the gl buffering function call somewhere along the line.

This may be a separate issue from what the OP is talking about though since my CPU usage is consistently around 8%. Perhaps It's possible there is more than one problem causing the sudden frame rate drops.

Ehrlichcoleb14_ESO

New player here. Same thing is happening to me. I've got a top shelf rig, but it doesn't matter because the game is only using 1 core on my Haswell E.

Shadow-Fighter

Its not the fault of ZOS, its a main issue of DirectX (Microsoft).
Think, DirectX 11 does all the CPU to GPU communication using one core and to the restrictions core 7 and core 8 are disabled