Framerate stutters, animation hitches and user interface unresponsiveness.

Tailger

The past couple of weeks I've been getting progressively worse game performance and I've got no idea what is causing it. Looking for thoughts, ideas, avenues for troubleshooting to help bring the game experience back.

Every 2-3 seconds in game, there is a sudden framerate hitch and stutter, where the system stops rendering the world for half a second or two. Character NPC animations will jump around and have no aspect of smoothness. The camera view will hitch and jump around. The user interface will be unresponsive for a half second or so. I was hoping it would clear up with update five, but alas I am not lucky.


System Hardware

The system is an Intel I7 930 running at 2.8ghz - http://ark.intel.com/products/41447/Intel-Core-i7-930-Processor-8M-Cache-2_80-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI

The system mainboard is a Gigabyte X58-UD3R - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3449#ov

The system has 12GB of RAM, 3x4GB (triple channel memory).

The game is installed on an Intel 600G SSD.

The video card is an Nvidia GTX 680 with 4GB of video memory.

Screen resolution is 1920x1200 at 60 hz. I've tried both vsync on and off, windowed full screen and full screen modes. None of those seem to make a difference.

I have Windows 7 64-bit installed on the system.


Things I have tried so far

Nvidia Video drivers - Currently I'm running 340.52, but I have tried 344.48 and 344.11. I've done a complete uninstall of all Nivida software in safe mode, reboot twice and then a reinstall of 344.52. None of them seem to make a difference.

Check storage - I've ran a full chkdsk /F /R on the SSD. This fixes any errors on the NTFS volume and also scans the media. No difference.

Done a repair from the game launcher. No difference.

Deleted the contents of %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Elder Scrolls Online. This includes UserSettings.txt and the ShaderCache.cooked file. I relaunched the game and let it choose defaults for all the graphics settings. On my system it defaults to the 'Ultra' preset. No difference.

Absolutely no add-ons are installed.

Tested hardware with other games - Tomb Raider has a built-in benchmark tool, so I put everything in that game to maximum settings and ran it. With vsync on, it did 60 fps max, 58 minimum. Seems to be okay hardware wise. I can re-run it with vsync off if anyone is curious.

Monitor CPU/GPU temperature while ESO was running. The CPU never exceeded 50°C and the video card never exceeded 83°C, both are well within their operating temperatures.


Internet connection

Well okay hardware seems good, maybe there is something wrong with my internet connection. Here is a speedtest.net result from this morning using a server geographically nearby me. I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area so the server in San Jose gives me a good result.






I believe the ESO NA servers are on the east coast, so perhaps its a problem elsewhere? Here is a speedtest from a server on the east coast, the worse case for this game:



Still a decent ping time. Update 5 has a latency monitor in it (thank you!) and while playing last night it went anywhere from 90-120. Are those numbers ping times?


Questions

Any other tests or troubleshooting I can provide? I would absolutely love to get to the bottom of this, even if it means shipping my computer to ZOS engineers myself.

Would it be worth throwing new hardware at this game? If so, what would you get? I built this system back in 2011 so its probably due for an upgrade anyway.

Updates and edits

Couple of things I forgot to mention. I've seen this thread: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/137665/stuttering

I've tried the SET RequestedNumJobThreads “0″ setting in UserSettings.txt, it makes no difference.

I have also changed the graphics presets all the way down to 'Minimum' and still see the stuttering / hitching, although it is less pronounced even at minimum.

Tailger

I have some good news. It seems like it is helped, but not cured completely, by disabling CPU parking in windows 7. I ran these at an administrative level command prompt.

powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 100

powercfg -setactive scheme_current

There are still framerate hitches and the animations still stutter, but its significantly better and not making me want to throw the whole computer out the window.

I can really see the NPC animation stutter and hitch when I do things like speak to the bank NPC. While the bank window is loading the bank contents, it definitely kills the animations.

TGiordano92

I get the stuttering as well, customer support ran out of troubleshooting techniques I think and stopped responding to me. It must be ESO problem.

rosendoichinoveb17_ESO

Tailger wrote: »

I have some good news. It seems like it is helped, but not cured completely, by disabling CPU parking in windows 7. I ran these at an administrative level command prompt.

powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 100

powercfg -setactive scheme_current

There are still framerate hitches and the animations still stutter, but its significantly better and not making me want to throw the whole computer out the window.

I can really see the NPC animation stutter and hitch when I do things like speak to the bank NPC. While the bank window is loading the bank contents, it definitely kills the animations.

Thank you that solved the problem for me. In addition from the Nvidia control panel I disabled shader caching function as well, as I think that I will eliminate the shutters if the files are not read from the disk. For some reason my performance improved as well going from 40-60 FPS to 60-90FPS

PC: i3 4 cores, Asus GTX970