Textures take too much time to load

barrrt

After 2.0.1 patch yesterday, entering a building can take few seconds to load all textures. Worst case so far, was this morning when entering the inn in Wayrest took approximately 8 seconds to load all walls, floors and ceilings. It seems the more complex the building (inns, banks, etc.) the longer it takes (makes sense). Usually not a problem with houses.

I am running up to date Yosemite, on a 2013 iMac 27” 3.5GHz i7, 24GB RAM, GeForce GTX 780M 4GB.

My graphics settings are as follows:

- window mode
- vsync on
- anti-alias off
- texture - medium
- subsampling - high
- shadow - medium
- water reflection low
- particles - 1024
- particle suppression dist - 50
- view dist - 75

Switches: ambient occlusion and magelight off, all others on.

Side note - cannot open ticket from within the game, as “Customer Support” tab in the Help menu of the game is just black area with “KNOWLEDGE BASE” text and no other controls (it’s been like this since about 1.2, give or take 1 patch).

I have already tried disabling all add-ons.

KhajitFurTrader

Hi @barrrt,

I have the same machine (with the PCI-SSD option), and I will try to verify this issue in the same location as soon as I get home. I got the patch today, since I'm playing EU.

The reason why you can't send a ticket at the moment is that with OS X 10.10 Yosemite , the build-in 3rd party web browser that's used to display the KB broke and crashes every time the support UI is opened.

KhajitFurTrader

Okay, been running around in Wayrest for a spell. Found a few locations where I could replicate the issue, to wit: the inn.

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/5020507/uploads/FileUpload/56/d487e14772e52693ca409d6a25fb0f.png&quot; />

I've entered the inn a few times times, and it always looked like this at first. It took from 1 to 3 seconds for the textures to load from my PCI-SSD. I tried entering other large buildings, like the Sorcerers and Fighters Guild, the King's castle, and the temple, but everything was fine there (I might have seen a very slight delay in texture loading within the temple). Enter the bank building:

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/5020507/uploads/FileUpload/9b/efb1ca6396f30d7ce3c37b1ac011fd.png&quot; />

This showed up only on the first time I entered, but not on repeated visits. Also, a very brief side-trip to Daggerfall was inconclusive, but this bears further testing.

My educated guess would be that what we're seeing here is a but recently (2.0.1) implemented counter-measure to the IOKit API memory management misbehavior introduced in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. So this loading behavior might actually help with improving client uptimes, which took a hit again when people switched to Yosemite. It might need a little bit of fine-tuning, though.

barrrt

I did notice it with the castle as well, but everything loaded very quickly. I have also been noticing the outside house textures loading too slowly from time to time (low rez versions show up, but higher rez do not load until I get very close), especially when sprinting on the horse, and my riding speed is only 6% upgraded.

Hopefully it will be resolved. Or rolled back... I'd rather have an occasional crash when entering a crafting station or after using a wayshrine (which has been happening from time to time, especially after 90+ minutes in PvP), than this behavior.

Thanks for checking this out! :-)

chris.dillman

Hi All,

>counter-measure to the IOKit API memory management

Nothing is in yet, soon...


There is a feature or 2 now that can effect the fading in and out of high res textures on buildings etc in order to.

This may be more visible when moving fast on a horse.
Basically theres no point in loading a bunch of data you are about to run by past.

Currently it is set to a rather aggressive stance on opengl.

This will be tuned more in the future.

This "should" not be effecting Textures loading but we will check on it.

barrrt

Thanks Chris.

FYI: This also happens in PvP. Standing on the SW tower at Chalman, the keep entry's stairs are just flat slanted surface unless I am standing right on the edge of the tower.

KhajitFurTrader

chris.dillman wrote: »

This will be tuned more in the future.

This "should" not be effecting Textures loading but we will check on it.

Thanks for the update, Chris. Much appreciated.

Malbec

I'm having the same problem on a brand new retina 5K iMac with the M295X 4gb graphics card.

Windshadow_ESO

installing a SSD on my older mac has helped a little and i no longer fall through the world which was happening about one in 20 times when i entered a space with nothing drawn but a few bits and bobs of stuff

barrrt

Hmm... I am not having problems falling through. That has happened only once or twice in the entire year of play, but not any time recently.

chris.dillman

Hi

So….. When these loading events happen can you all check the activity monitor and make sure theres no other running tasks that would being doing a bunch of DISK I/O work? Spotlight, Indexing, Anti Virus apps, Back up software. They are all known to kill ESO fps and data load times as ESO attempt to stream in thousands of files at a time.

You run into a city and BAM 3000+ files load in.

In the past we have seen reports of bad performance the day after a patch that then go away a day later.


barrrt,

Are you getting 90 min in PVP with before an out of memory crash on the current build?
And is that better then the initial 1.6 build?

In theory some of the new high res texture rejection code can save 300 MB of running ram ( this was on DX11 ).

Malbec

Chris,

For me, this happens with no other apps running in the background. I have 16GB of RAM and 4GB of VRAM.

This has never happened with 1.6 or prior. I only noticed this happening since 2.0.1.

KhajitFurTrader

Settings: I played in Windowed (Fullscreen) mode, in order to be able to switch between apps. Late 2013 27" (2560x1440) iMac, 3.5 GHz Core i7 (4c/8t), 32 GB RAM, PCI-SSD, nvidia GTX 780M 4 GB VRAM. OS X 10.10.2 build 14C1510 (latest). ESO graphics options are customized down from Ultra-High default, texture and subsampling q on high.

Test location: Entering Cloudy Dregs Inn in Wayrest, Glenumbra

Here's what I found after a bout of testing:

• I could only ever see textures failing to load at the very first occurrence of entering -- on any subsequent entering, everything looked as it should be
• In order to clear the location's textures, I would try to exit the game and restart it, even do a sudo purge in-between, but funnily enough, textures were there all the time, even after restarting the game.
• I could only kick them out by jumping into areas with completely different tile sets, e.g. going to Alikr and back did the trick for me. After doing this, textures were missing again at the first occurrence of entering.
• Now here's the thing. During such first occurrences, immediately after entering (pressing 'E' outside the door), I would Alt-Tab out of the game's window to scrutinize the Activity Monitor's disk data or I/O bar. During this time, standing immediately behind the door, textures would not load at all, while there was next to no disk activity. Tabbing back and moving even slightly into the common room, textures would load within the reported delay time (1 - 3 seconds).
• My samples of disk activity are inconclusive. At no time was there a higher load than usual. See attached snippets.

barrrt

Chris,

No unusual disk activity when this is happening that I can tell. Although I have few things running, it's my usual set of programs that are always open. Time Machine drive is off.

I had the same issues with Wayrest inn this morning. I was actually able to get to the fire and craft a drink before walls showed up (regular walking, no rapid maneuver or anything of sots). I haven't had a chance to try other areas before work.

As to PvP - a bit over two hours now and no crash. I made sure to port few times, and visited crafting stations as well in the last few minutes - since those activities usually triggered the crash. The 90 minute figure is "average" of course. In some cases it would be 30, in others 2 hours+. iStat Menus is showing video card's memory usage at bout 60% and the chart is very flat for the last hour.

I did crash in PvP last night, but it was different than previous crashes - game window disappeared, beachball came up, then I got the OSX "your application..." window. There was no crash report (all blank). The "usual" crash is accompanied by video freeze for a second or so, then crash reporter comes up filled in.

Gotta run, DC at Arrius...

:-)

voyxx

I do have that problem with textures not loading properly too. It started with the update to 1.6. It seems to be a Mac problem. I checked with a friend who uses a pc with Windows. He does not have the texture loading problem. I noticed it first in the bank in Velyn harbour. Now I am in Rawl'kha and it happens in the bank and in the inn. I haven't had that problem in dungeons yet.

chris.dillman

Hi All

Small update.
We were able to get the texture loading issue to show up on a number of Macs
including a new Mac Pro ( fast SSD, RAM, CPU etc where load times are generally almost instant ).

With the launch of the ESO 2.0 patch there were some restructuring of the Threading task system
to help distribute tasks better across more cores.

You may have noticed that ESO now feels smoother even at lower frame rates.

ESO is supposed to put up a loading screen if an area seems like it will take longer to load.
That loading screen is not happening with the current build.

adarkartist

chris.dillman wrote: »

Hi All

Small update.
We were able to get the texture loading issue to show up on a number of Macs
including a new Mac Pro ( fast SSD, RAM, CPU etc where load times are generally almost instant ).

With the launch of the ESO 2.0 patch there were some restructuring of the Threading task system
to help distribute tasks better across more cores.

You may have noticed that ESO now feels smoother even at lower frame rates.

ESO is supposed to put up a loading screen if an area seems like it will take longer to load.
That loading screen is not happening with the current build.

so this happens with almost every building I enter, does that mean every building i enter is going to have a load screen when u fix it?

KhajitFurTrader

Thanks for the update, Chris!

chris.dillman wrote: »

With the launch of the ESO 2.0 patch there were some restructuring of the Threading task system
to help distribute tasks better across more cores.

I was under the impression that OS X core utilization was already running circles around that of Windows. So this was a change to mainly help Windows get into gear, perhaps?

chris.dillman

adarkartist wrote: »

chris.dillman wrote: »

Hi All

Small update.
We were able to get the texture loading issue to show up on a number of Macs
including a new Mac Pro ( fast SSD, RAM, CPU etc where load times are generally almost instant ).

With the launch of the ESO 2.0 patch there were some restructuring of the Threading task system
to help distribute tasks better across more cores.

You may have noticed that ESO now feels smoother even at lower frame rates.

ESO is supposed to put up a loading screen if an area seems like it will take longer to load.
That loading screen is not happening with the current build.

so this happens with almost every building I enter, does that mean every building i enter is going to have a load screen when u fix it?

HI adarkartist

It might.

Depends on what kind of solution we come up with.

Remember the OSX, Windows, PS4 all work very differently underneath.
You can't actually do the exact same things on all of them in the same way.

chris.dillman

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Thanks for the update, Chris!

chris.dillman wrote: »

With the launch of the ESO 2.0 patch there were some restructuring of the Threading task system
to help distribute tasks better across more cores.

I was under the impression that OS X core utilization was already running circles around that of Windows. So this was a change to mainly help Windows get into gear, perhaps?

KhajitFurTrader

MMOs are an organic moving target of code
Anyhow the need for changes to the engine and how task threading happens is for the game consoles.

Xbox One and PS4 are basically cheap PCs with a bunch of slow cores (8?)

Making a modern game engine scale between 3-4 processors is pretty easy / straight forward.

Making an engine scale between 8 cores is a whole new level of complexity.

The side effect of console work is that any optimization should have a long term positive effect on PC / Mac.

curlyqloub14_ESO

Well, first off, glad to find this thread, as I'm seeing the same issue, and was concerned that my less-than-a-year-old iMac was failing. So, good to know it's not my machine.

However, this...

chris.dillman wrote: »

adarkartist wrote: »

so this happens with almost every building I enter, does that mean every building i enter is going to have a load screen when u fix it?

It might.

Depends on what kind of solution we come up with.

...makes me very sad. Please, please please - there must be a better solution than loading screens EVERY time I enter a building.

KhajitFurTrader

Thanks for the insight, Chris...

chris.dillman wrote: »

Xbox One and PS4 are basically cheap PCs with a bunch of slow cores (8?)

... and the genuine laugh.

rampoob16_ESO

Same here, every building, new Mac....earlier ESO Version no Problem. If you put a loading screen for every building...the game for me is gone

KhajitFurTrader

Been running around the busy cities of Daggerfall and Wayrest tonight, now that I have 2.0.2.

Frist thing I did was reset graphics settings to Default (as always). Decent frame rates, no loading screens. Only thing that was very noticeable was the "late" LOD texture change, i.e. it happened when the building or structure in question was so close that it was very visible. Also, the way the high-res texture blended over the lower-res was very "pronounced". Either effect was a bit "immersion-braking".

Outside of town I noticed that the shadowing of objects crept slowly before me in the direction I was moving. Reminded me a bit of the light on Diskworld, which "slows down when moving through a strong magic field".

Have to play around with view distance, it's still on 37 by default.

Edit: and yes, I still saw the delayed texture loading in some, but not all larger buildings. Cloudy Dregs Inn in Wayrest was fine however, no matter what I did.

chris.dillman

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Been running around the busy cities of Daggerfall and Wayrest tonight, now that I have 2.0.2.

Outside of town I noticed that the shadowing of objects crept slowly before me in the direction I was moving. Reminded me a bit of the light on Diskworld, which "slows down when moving through a strong magic field".

Hi KhajitFurTrader,

It's always been that way. Please make sure when you went back to default settings it did not restore things to high versus ultra. Theres a change in place for the hardware test not to recommend Ultra on Mac anymore.

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Edit: and yes, I still saw the delayed texture loading in some, but not all larger buildings. Cloudy Dregs Inn in Wayrest was fine however, no matter what I did.

>>>We have yet to address this issue, but will look into it.

UPDATE… The late texture loading happens on PCs also.

LameoveR

I have found a cause of a long time texture load.
It relates to D3D9 graphic setting in usersettings.txt file.
In D3D11 i have no delay in texture load, but with D3D9 it takes some time.
sorry for my bad english

baratron

I am so glad that there's a thread about this and that ZoS people are already looking into it. It's driving me mad! When I walk into Elden Root, this is what I see:


I expect to have loading issues because my laptop has the literal minimum graphics required to run ESO, but my friend who has a mid-2014 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM is seeing the same thing. It's actually painful! I expect to be on Minimum graphics, but his machine should be able to manage Medium easily.

Personally, the only other app I run at the same time as ESO is Joystick Mapper. I run my game directly from the dock so I don't even run the Launcher.

LameoveR

[EDIT] Solution for PC.
Close game and launcher.
Go to your Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live folder
open usersettings.txt file
find there line SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D9"
change it to
SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D11"
Restart game and take a look at texture loading.

Sorry, i'm just looking at RECENT discussions and trying to help and get some info

barrrt

LameoveR wrote: »

Close game and launcher.
Go to your Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live folder
open usersettings.txt file
find there line SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D9"
change it to
SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D11"
Restart game and take a look at texture loading.

This is a thread on Mac support forum. OS X uses OpenGL, not DirectX.

Srithla

I'm seeing the same thing as @baratron inside most of the buildings in Davon's Watch. I never had this issue before 2.0.x. This is completely new.

I also looked at the user settings.txt file as @LameoveR suggests, but didn't touch it because mine has a value of "OPENGL", which is probably expected as this is the Mac tech support forum and I think the other settings refer to DirectX, which is PC only. If we should try this nonetheless, I'll give it a go.

(Stats if it matters: MBPro late 2013, 2.6 quad core 17, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2 GB VRAM, running 10.9.5, so it's not just Yosemite. (I had too many issues with Yosemite, so migrated back, but that's a separate issue.) Also seen on our earlier MBPro, too.)

LameoveR

Sorry Didn't take a look at forum name.