Graphical Artifacts ( stretched polygons ) Fix - Windows 10

Alkanphel

Hi,

I started playing ESO about 3 weeks ago and have been enjoying it, however almost right away I started having distorted, stretched polygons and texture artifacts. Sometimes this would happen after a short period of play, sometimes after a long period and once literally 3mins after I logged in.

This post is to highlight the issue I had and how to solve it if anyone else has it. This issue only occurred in ESO, games like The Witcher 3, MGSV, GTAV, BF4 etc all ran fine for hours on end.

From past experience I immediately suspected an overheating GPU and as I run an SLI setup it was a possibility, so I monitored temps whilst in ESO and everything was checking out. I ran Furmark, Kombuster and Heaven stress tests, each overnight and every morning the temps were fine and 0 artifacts/errors. The fact other games were also not artifacting lead me to believe its not my hardware ( I built and run a pretty slick rig ).

Just to be safe I turned off my CPU overclock ( other hardware isn't OC-ed ) but still the issue continued.

I tried lowering the settings to minimum but still the issue continued.

Tried turning off multi monitor ( NV Surround in my case ) and played on 1 monitor but still the issue continued.

Tried disabling SLI and ran of 1 card but still the issue continued.

Left memtest86 running overnight to check my RAM, no fails and still the issue continued.

Ran VMT & memtestG80 to test both cards VRAM, no fails and still the issue continued.

Tinkered with the UserSettings.txt, adjusted based on other posts but still the issue continued.

I downloaded the client and re-installed twice on different hard drives ( took ages! ) and still the issue continued.

I updated all my firmware, both cards and motherboard bios's and still the issue continued.

I tried disabling all add ons and still the issue continued.

I tried using the SLI profile included with NV Inspector and still the issue continued.

I updated to the latest Geforce drivers as well as the latest Direct X and motherboard drivers and still the issue continued.

Made eso.exe large address aware and still the issue continued.

Installed CleanMem to clean the eso.exe processes from RAM ( there is a memory leak when playing for 5hrs+ fps drops, this fixes that ) but still the issue continued.

Set eso.exe to run as admin and still the issue continued.

At this point I was ready to write an email to support, I like this game and wanna play it undisturbed by immersion breaking bugs so whilst i was changing the admin rights back to normal on the eso.exe I thought to try compatibility mode for Windows 7, I mean this thing usually never works and for stretched polygons it was highly doubtful in my mind it would do anything but can you believe it ... it worked! I've been playing for 3 days now without the artifacting issue, 2 sessions for extended periods and all is well.

So in conclusion if you run Windows 10 and have distorted/stretched polygons and textures only in ESO ( if its in other games, OS or Bios then its gonna be hardware failure ), set compatibility mode to Windows 7 and give it a go.

Hope this helps someone as I found next to nothing on the topic.

Peace!