Please Read First - Known Technical Issues (Mac)

ZOS_HugoP · June 2014

This thread has been unpinned and may contain outdated information. For technical support information, we recommend checking this thread.

Thank you for playing The Elder Scrolls Online!

This thread covers technical issues people are encountering, and potential solutions. If your problem is not listed here, you may want to check the latest patch notes, or try searching on our knowledge base. Our KB covers a wide range of game questions and issues, and can even be accessed in-game by typing "/help" in the chat window.

Mac Crashing on game launch:
Running ESO on OSX 10.8 or older. ( ESO requires OSX 10.9 or greater. )

Frequent Mac Client Crashing:
Could be due to the game client slowly leaking memory over long play sessions.
Memory usage can be significantly reduced by turning textures down to medium or by turning the graphics settings down to medium.

I get a black screen with music playing when I run ESO on my dual-CPU Mac Pro
ESO is now officially supporting dual-CPU Mac Pros. However, you might encounter some issues with dual CPU when using 3rd party video card.

If you are still encountering this issue, please contact our customer support team, and make sure to provide the following information:

Mac model:
OS version:
Graphical card (GPU) model:
Amount of RAM:

Graphics:
How to show frames per second in game
Enter: "/fps" in the chat window
This will let you see your frame rate in the top left corner of the screen.

Performance hints:
The general settings of high, medium, and low influence more than just the visible settings. They also influence the quality level of the shadows being used.
It is generally better to start on high settings and turn off features then it is to go directly to medium settings.

Shadows are REALLY SLOW to draw.
To draw the shadows, ESO has to draw every 3D object casting a shadow a second time.
The easiest way to get more speed out of ESO is to simply turn the shadows down to low or off.

Why can't my brand new 15" Retina Mac Book pro Run ESO at full native resolution?
Current mobile GPUs are designed to be used in games at recommend settings of 1400-by-900 on Mac and PC.
ESO uses a modern deferred render. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

Players encountering stuttering frame rate in-game.

Possible causes:

This can be attributed to users with 4GB of RAM or lower.
Possible Fixes:
- Quitting all other programs before launching ESO, or even rebooting, can help the issue.
- Adding more RAM to the Mac can help. 8 GB is great for average Mac Users.
- Adding a SSD drive to a Mac can help, SSD drives use a form of RAM
  to store data and can be read x10 faster than a normal hard drive.
When the Mac uses the GPU ( graphics card ) to render the game it stores all the textures, 3D model data in the Mac's GPU Memory. As this fills up, the Mac will shuffle the unused parts of the data to normal RAM or virtual memory.
Possible Fixes:
- Try turning textures down to medium, this cuts the memory used by textures to 1/4 vs high.
- If things don't improve, try turning down the graphics settings to low.

I installed the ESO client on my Mac, but I can't find the launcher.
To find the launcher manually, double-click the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop
(If you cannot see your Macintosh HD, click on Finder on the toolbar along the top of the screen).

Select Preference from the drop down menu.
Place a check in the Hard Drive box under Show These Items on Desktop.
Double click on the Applications folder.
Double click on the Zenimax Online folder.
Double click on the Launcher (it will have the Ouroboros icon).

I'm encountering the 209/210 Patch Manifest error.
Please follow the steps below to uninstall and reinstall the ESO beta client (do not uninstall the game from your computer’s Control Panel):

Uninstall the Game Client:
- Select the Beta Client on left hand side of the Patcher
- Go to Game Options
- Select Uninstall
Install Beta Client
- In the Launcher select the Beta Client
- Click Install

When trying to run the Mac/OSX launcher, I'm getting a "Null Pointer Error."
You need to deactivate the Automatic Proxy settings:

Click "Network".
Select your internet connection in the menu on the left side (it will have a green dot).
Click "Advanced" on the right hand side after your internet connection has been selected.
Click the "Proxies" tab.
Uncheck the box for "Automatic Proxy Discovery".

No Audio in ESO on Mac.
If you are having this issue, please submit your hardware specs to our Customer Support Team.
Please also specify if you have any audio recording equipment hooked up to your Mac, and what it is.

Mac installer cannot install to any drive but the main drive.
However, after installation, the "Zenimax" folder can be copied to any drive.

ZOS_HugoP · June 2014

We have updated this FAQ to reflect the changes we made to the MAC client, with the current known issues and potential solutions. Please make sure to check this list before submitting a ticket to our customer support team and/or before posting in our MAC technical support forum.