PC Minimum System Requirements are grossly overestimated and marketing is fragmented because of this

dillon_newellb16_ESO

Hey, I've been playing ESO since day 1, and I've enjoyed much of the progress it's made since then. However the system requirements for the game seem to have evolved to a point where players close to the recommended specs originally published are now at the current minimum specs, and graphic quality has not increased much at all.

The original specs (which can still be found on UESP) for GPU were

Recommended AMD 6950/NVIDIA 560 Ti
Minimum ATI 2600/NVIDIA 8800

Now they are (pulled from steam)

Recommended AMD 7850/NVIDIA 750
Minimum AMD 6850/NVIDIA 460

So now the game apparently does not support any Intel iGPUs, all of which lag behind a 6850 in performance by a large margin, whereas some of the higher end iGPUs are much better than an ATI 2600. So anyone who bought the game thinking they could play it, now are well below the minimum specs. These iGPUs can still run the game fine, however if they run into problems then no support will be provided as they are below the minumum specs for the game.

This in itself isn't so bad, since a long life cycle MMO is bound to become more demanding overtime as features are added. However the game is still being marketed as playable on low end devices, so unsuspecting consumers will buy it without even knowing they are well below the minimum requirements! An example is Microsoft for their Surface Pro tablet.

I bought a Surface Pro 4 expecting to be able to play ESO fine (since the SP4 is much more powerful than the SP3 pictured for graphics), however it crashes and won't even start! I can get it to start in DX9 mode, but performance in DX11 is usually much better. The game runs great when it runs though, 30fps on low settings with the native resolution (a full 2736x1824 !). The problem is no support case will open to fix the DX11 bug since this is below the minimum specs.

I think ZOS should either:

Make minimum specs more realistic, so as to provide support for devices capable of running the game fully but unable to due to a bug.

End marketing for computers that fall worlds behind the minimum specs.

Just don't want more people to go out and buy something like this tablet and then buy the game only to find it crashes, and get no help from support because it's below spec (even though the answer is as simple as switch to DX9 mode in usersettings.txt).

Also if this bug is on your end and not Intel's, it would be nice if you could fix the DX11 crash on Skylake iGPUs.

Thanks!

SirAndy

When will people stop blaming their hardware for the shortcomings of the ESO client (and servers)?

josefcifkaeb17_ESO

I have AMD 6950 and I play on ultra settings, getting under 30 fps only in higly populated cities and I'm runing two monitors at once. However, since recently (I think last update) no matter what setting I change to lower than ultra the game still runs on the same fps which is very strange... Also I used to have cca 40-60 fps outside of cities and 30-35 fps inside of cities, but now I have everywhere 30-35 fps.

ladyonthemoon

I've also AMD hardware, running the game on high settings and getting decent fps (40 in 60) and latency (under 100 ms) but I'm also getting awful lag and stuttering at times with no drop of fps and latency. Yesterday, quitting the game made my computer get completely stuck on logging out; no other way but unplug it and restart it... Happened also when I tried entering a new zone (Sheogorath's realm). Not counting my drivers crashing on launch...

Whatever is happening out there needs to be fixed.