Unexplainable huge fps drop

Rafarlox

Hello everyone.

I am here to talk about a problem that has been affecting my friend for over two months now. While she's playing normally, the game will have without prior notice a huge fps drop (from +120 to less than 12) which can last either a few minutes, or which lasts until a restart of the game (sometimes she even needs to restart her laptop!).

We’re having a lot of trouble to find the cause of this problem, because it can occur at various moments while she is playing. Sometimes this happens while we’re doing a dungeon. Sometimes she is in an empty house doing nothing, she goes afk for a few minutes and when she is back the game has lost more than 100 fps with no understandable reason. The fps drop can also occur when entering the character selection screen.

And because this problem isn’t bad enough, the fps causes a performance loss on her laptop. Everything she will trying to do will by laggy, the task manager stop to respond but neither the RAM, CPU nor GPU seems to be at abnormal amount of consumption. This only occurs when she is playing ESO. There is also a weird audio bug that occurs during the fps drop : the sound of setting a pin on the map will repeat itself in loop every 2 seconds.

Closing the game will sometimes fix the problem (either the fps drop or the loss of performance outside of the game), but if its works it’s only temporary. And when its doesn’t work then she will have to restart her laptop, without assurance that the problem will not resume when starting the game again.

Now that the problem has been explained, you will find below the PC specs

• Laptop : IdeaPad Gaming 3 15ARH05
• OS : Windows 10 Home, 64-bit (version 21H1, build 19043.1348)
• RAM : 16 Go
• CPU : AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics (2.9 GHz)
• GPU : Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 (G6)
• DirectX version : 12.0
• Game played with Steam

I will sum up what we have tried :
Outside the game :

• Checking the background process (nothing abnormal)
• Checking the RAM, CPU and GPU usage while the problem occur (again nothing abnormal)
• Disabling any background apps that launch at startup
• Assured ourselves that the GPU used by the game is the main GPU (Nvidia)
  • This has been done from the Nvidia control panel
  • And windows graphics settings panel
• Updating Windows
• Updating gpu and cpu drivers from the fabricant’s website
• Disabling the power saving of her laptop
  • We also activated the high performances settings for ESO (in Windows settings and the Nvidia control panel)
• Checking the laptop temperature (normal for the CPU and GPU)
• Disabling the hardware acceleration of Discord
• Checking any malware
• Scanning of the system
• Following the instruction in this page
  

In the game :

• Playing with and without the eso launcher opened
• Lowering settings
  • Lowered : shadows, render distance, particles, textures, sub-samplings
  • Removed/Disabled : grass, bloom, ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, vsync (enabled or disabled)
• Changing the game display mode (Windowed, full-screen, windowed full-screen)
• Disabling addons one by one, then removing every addons
• Deleting the ShaderCache.cooked
• Adjusted some settings in UserSettings.txt
  • Set GPUSmoothingFrames to 0 or 1 (from 10)
• Repairing the game
• Uninstall then Reinstall the game

As you can see, we have tried many things but without any success. My friend has sent a ticket to the support trying to get some help, but for now nothing has worked to fix this problem. So, we’re asking for help, hoping to find a solution so my friend can play again.

Thanks for you reading and your help.

Have a great day.

Lucifer_Sam

Have you tried turning multi-threaded rendering off? I don't see it mentioned above and it was turned on by default about the time you say this started.

Rafarlox

Lucifer_Sam wrote: »

Have you tried turning multi-threaded rendering off? I don't see it mentioned above and it was turned on by default about the time you say this started.

I forgot to mention it, but we've tried it (enabled and disabled), and the only difference is that my friend has a bit more fps when it is enabled but this doesn't fix the problem in either cases.

etchedpixels

Rafarlox wrote: »

Hello everyone.

I am here to talk about a problem that has been affecting my friend for over two months now. While she's playing normally, the game will have without prior notice a huge fps drop (from +120 to less than 12) which can last either a few minutes, or which lasts until a restart of the game (sometimes she even needs to restart her laptop!).

When it happens are the temperature values for the graphics and or CPU way way high ? Laptops in particular will throttle performance hard if they get too hot - but if so it seems weird that it might last so long.

ZOS_Bill

@Rafarlox

In your troubleshooting list you mention deleting the shadercache.cooked file.

Have you also tried backing up and also deleting the usersetting.txt file?

Rafarlox

etchedpixels wrote: »

Rafarlox wrote: »

Hello everyone.

I am here to talk about a problem that has been affecting my friend for over two months now. While she's playing normally, the game will have without prior notice a huge fps drop (from +120 to less than 12) which can last either a few minutes, or which lasts until a restart of the game (sometimes she even needs to restart her laptop!).

When it happens are the temperature values for the graphics and or CPU way way high ? Laptops in particular will throttle performance hard if they get too hot - but if so it seems weird that it might last so long.

The temperature is perfectly normal even during the fps drop.

Rafarlox

ZOS_BillE wrote: »

@Rafarlox

In your troubleshooting list you mention deleting the shadercache.cooked file.

Have you also tried backing up and also deleting the usersetting.txt file?

We haven't tried it because we didn't think it was necessary. Is there another settings in the usersetting.txt file, other than GPUSmoothingFrames, that has an impact on the FPS ?


For the moment the loss does not occur anymore (we haven't done anything in particular) but the next time the problem happens we will try to delete the usersetting.txt file.

Nestor

The usersetting text file is derived from a template. So it is safe to remove. If for some reason you want to keep it, just rename the file, like add old_ to the front of the file name

ZOS_Bill

@Rafarlox

Thank you for the update. As mentioned in the post above, the usersettings.txt file is safe to delete as it will recreate itself.