Dual CPU Mac Pro Current Situation

Moonraker

As we know from the Known Issues (Mac) sticky, the ESO Mac client does not officially support dual CPU (it does support multiple cores which is different) Mac Pros, although for some it just works and others were able to use the workaround to disable some of the cores to make it work.

It would be useful to know if the workaround is still required for those that used it or whether the Mac client works without it now after several patches and Updates?

Please post if you use a Mac Pro with dual CPU and whether it just works or still requires the workaround, or if you have issues with it still.

Thanks.

SamWale

I'm using an Early 2009 Mac Pro with dual CPU (2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon).

The game runs fine most of the time and Activity Monitor shows that the cores don't seem to be struggling, but I'm still having serious FPS drops (10-30 fps) and stutters in towns. In dungeons and various other areas I'm getting 80-100 fps, so I can't think of anything else that might causing the problem.

I haven't tried the dual CPU workaround yet as I don't have XCode installed. Is that likely to help with the FPS issues?

Moonraker

SamWale wrote: »

I'm using an Early 2009 Mac Pro with dual CPU (2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon).

The game runs fine most of the time and Activity Monitor shows that the cores don't seem to be struggling, but I'm still having serious FPS drops (10-30 fps) and stutters in towns. In dungeons and various other areas I'm getting 80-100 fps, so I can't think of anything else that might causing the problem.

I haven't tried the dual CPU workaround yet as I don't have XCode installed. Is that likely to help with the FPS issues?

Hard to say. Only way is probably to try it .

FPS drops and stutters in towns is mostly down to graphics card performance and settings i.e.e settings suited to installed GPU to achieve balance of smooth play/ FPS and decent visuals. So depends rather on what graphics card you have and tweaking settings.

It is also impacted by server side lag and performance which I find is causing stuttering and slow draw in rather more after 1.2.3 which may be related to known FPS drop issues they are looking to resolve. Or just stress at peak times and/ or network.

You would get a better idea of this by testing play on the PTS public server which has a much lower population and gives the player a better idea of base performance to compare to live.

The question posed in the OP is more directed at those who had to use the fix to actually play and whether it is still required.

Windshadow_ESO

On my mid 2006 1.1 Mac Pro dual 3 ghz dual core 4780 video dual 1920x1200 apple cinema displays 19 gig ram 1 Tera SSD system 7.5.x it has worked just fine ( well as fine as it runs on a mac book pro running 9.x starting in January SSD on the old pro...
Even with graphics set to mostly low and grass at 35 the laptop just pauses for a moment or three every once in a short while the old mac pro never stutters this way in pve areas naturally I avoid the pvp game on both computers.

I also just play on the PTS these days I have not been back to the NA server for weeks I just got tired of dealing with all the bots and spam.

Moonraker

Windshadow_ESO wrote: »

On my mid 2006 1.1 Mac Pro dual 3 ghz dual core 4780 video dual 1920x1200 apple cinema displays 19 gig ram 1 Tera SSD system 7.5.x it has worked just fine ( well as fine as it runs on a mac book pro running 9.x starting in January SSD on the old pro...
Even with graphics set to mostly low and grass at 35 the laptop just pauses for a moment or three every once in a short while the old mac pro never stutters this way in pve areas naturally I avoid the pvp game on both computers.

I also just play on the PTS these days I have not been back to the NA server for weeks I just got tired of dealing with all the bots and spam.

Thanks for the feedback. Any more feedback is welcome on this particular issue.

SamWale

Does anyone know if dual CPU support will be introduced in a future update?

It would considerably boost the game's performance for many of us!

Moonraker

SamWale wrote: »

Does anyone know if dual CPU support will be introduced in a future update?

It would considerably boost the game's performance for many of us!

No idea I'm afraid. It seems to work on dual CPU Macs generally even when not officially supported. However Im not sure they can enable support to use both CPU for the game which I would guess would require specific coding. Same for PC also.

Moonraker

SamWale wrote: »

Does anyone know if dual CPU support will be introduced in a future update?

It would considerably boost the game's performance for many of us!

Just as a question on this. Exactly what is not working currently with latest version of ESO and what you would expect is it was fully supported (rather than simply working without tweaks via one CPU)? As I do not have one I am not sure on this.

SamWale

Well I could be wrong but I'm assuming it would solve the seriously unstable FPS and stutter problem I've been having pretty much since I started playing.

I'm using a GTX 660 with 20GB RAM and a relatively stable internet connection, so from what I can see it must be my CPUs that are the bottleneck - 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon.

I use this system primarily for high-end audio production with Logic Pro X and a number of extremely demanding plug-ins and sample libraries running simultaneously. It handles this almost effortlessly, distributing the workload evenly over all 16 virtual cores.

With this game running I can only see half of those virtual cores active, and usually one working much harder than the rest, but none of them maxed out. If this game could efficiently utilise all of the CPU cores in my system I'm sure it would perform considerably better!

SamWale

I should also add that I've disabled all add-ons and reduced view distance to 40 and shadows to low.

The game performs no worse on Ultra than it does on Low-Medium settings, with stutters and drops below 20fps every 10-20 seconds and approximately 15fps in busy areas such as Skywatch and Elden Root.

Moonraker

SamWale wrote: »

Well I could be wrong but I'm assuming it would solve the seriously unstable FPS and stutter problem I've been having pretty much since I started playing.

I'm using a GTX 660 with 20GB RAM and a relatively stable internet connection, so from what I can see it must be my CPUs that are the bottleneck - 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon.

I use this system primarily for high-end audio production with Logic Pro X and a number of extremely demanding plug-ins and sample libraries running simultaneously. It handles this almost effortlessly, distributing the workload evenly over all 16 virtual cores.

With this game running I can only see half of those virtual cores active, and usually one working much harder than the rest, but none of them maxed out. If this game could efficiently utilise all of the CPU cores in my system I'm sure it would perform considerably better!

If it is running eight cores then it is supporting all cores but the Hyper-threading is not functioning (for the 16 cores)

That it is running all eight cores seems to confirm it is supported correctly but for some reason the Hyper-threading is not. On the PC players were disabling the multi-threading in UserSettings.txt to improve stability so this is not necessarily a bad thing. I have an i5 processor so can only comment myself on four core which works fine and is often considered fine for gaming as few games support more.

What you describe on core usage being uneven and a lot of activity on one core is actually more in common with PC posts. In that one or two cores seem to get used with others hardly active and why in fact the CPU is bottlenecked in ESO from tests (I have not seen any more recently so perhaps that has changed)

There are many threads on this like this example (just search 'CPU cores' terms)

From my tests of both Mac and PC client via Bootcamp, the Mac client has always given even load over all cores and I also saw one core being worked hard and confirming observations posted in the forums on the PC client. So it seemed that Mac OS X was handling the threads much better across available cores. It may be that with the dual CPU Mac Pro that it is in fact working more like the PC client from your description which 'may' be a reason for the stuttering and FPS drop.

I posted a while back on this difference with some images which show it more clearly.

There was also some confirmation on this posted previously in this thread worth checking with a Mac Pro and testing the Hyper-threading. Note that it is six core CPUs not four core.

As to why this may be happening on the Mac Pro I can't say as I don't have one to test myself.

SamWale

Thanks for this info, very much appreciated!

I seem to have solved the stutter problem by disabling hyperthreading in the UserSettings.txt file, and can see that the 8 CPU cores are all much more active now.

My FPS is still below 20 in busy areas, even when switching from Ultra to Medium graphics, but at least it's an improvement for now!

Moonraker

SamWale wrote: »

Thanks for this info, very much appreciated!

I seem to have solved the stutter problem by disabling hyperthreading in the UserSettings.txt file, and can see that the 8 CPU cores are all much more active now.

My FPS is still below 20 in busy areas, even when switching from Ultra to Medium graphics, but at least it's an improvement for now!

Glad it helped. it does seem something related to multi-threading. Having the more even core thread load should help with any stuttering.

FPS wise it's more graphics card I suspect and possibly the drivers. Make sure Shadow Quality is Low or Off and View Distance reduced can help too.