Frequent Lags and Stutters... Help? (UPDATE)

Codius

Good Afternoon ESO.

For some odd reason I have been experiencing issues with the game-play while playing ESO.

WHAT I'VE NOTICED

While playing the game, my FPS would drastically drop from 60fps to 10 fps in an instant. And then, I would have to wait every 10 seconds or so for the framerate to build up again. I would understand hitting a lag spike here and there, but this happens almost every 30 seconds! Goodness! To help be more specific, The game wouldn't freeze, It will just stutter while playing the game constantly. No crashes.

WHAT I DID TO TRY TO FIX

I have made sure that I allowed ESO through firewall by adding it to the list.
I have fully updated my Nvidia Driver.
I have repaired AND Reinstalled the game.
I have played other games to see if the issue continued while playing other games, (GW2, WOW, etc.) BUT only Elder Scrolls was lagging and stuttering.
I changed the graphics to "Medium" & "Low", but the stuttering never went away. (also set Maximum Particles to lowest as well)
No browsers were open while playing the game.


HERE ARE MY COMPUTER SPECS


Machine name: MYCOMPUTER
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
System Manufacturer: MSI
System Model: MS-7693
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-4130 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.8GHz
Memory: 8GB RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
Power Supply: 980W

(Not bad for a budget computer I must say, lol)


I take good care of my computer, It is not dusty and there are multiple fans to keep this baby cycled and cooled...

(UPDATE! READ BELOW)

I have managed to come across a 'fix' that actually eliminated that fps drop and stuttering issue. It took a while but I found it! YaY!

I came across a thread that displayed instructions on how to FLUSH YOUR DNS!

1: Click on your 'Windows Icon' on the bottom left of your screen.
2: Type 'run' until a popup appears.
3: Type 'cmd' in that one to open up your cmd screen (it will look like like a completely black screen with white letters.
4: Once that screen is up, type this EXACTLY! --> ipconfig /flushdns
5: the cmd will then say flush successful, and then you can close the cmd tab.

I am running on a Windows 7, So I have no idea if other software's such as mac will have the command prompt.
And if this doesn't work, then I am sorry.

Wily_Wizard

Unfortunately it's the state of the game. What you are experiencing is the best case scenario. It's sad to even say this, but many of us cant even play the game because of frequent crashing, so in a way you are lucky to only have stutters/lag.

For a few months my system was not crashing at all, but I did have these exact stutters you are referring to. I narrowed it down to a network or server latency issue on ESO's end. Perhaps their ISP has occasional peering issues with some of the tier 1 providers, usually related to peering congestion on the network for any clients that happen to be unfortunate enough to connect through that particular gateway.

That's just my best guess, because these ISP companies promise the world for a good price, but it all boils down to SLA's (service level agreements), and as long as they stay within the boundaries of the SLA, there's not much that ESO can do about it. Additionally, these kind of issues are outside of ESO's domain, per se, so that don't really have the access required to adequately troubleshoot the issue. To make matter worse, many times they cant even drop the ISP in favor of a new one, because they have a contract. Finally it would cost a fortune to physically move their servers to a new location (or to move their games to new hosted servers), and it would be a monumental undertaking with lots of hurdles.

LostScot

I've been experiencing exactly the same problem - framerate solid at 60fps with it dropping down to 10fps and staying there for a few seconds before going back up to 60fps. This happens quite frequently, and has been happening to me ever since the Imperial City update.

Yesterday I made a small change to the game settings and have reduced the impact - I turned off vertical sync. I've had it enabled ever since the game was in beta and despite resetting my settings by deleting the usersettings.txt file every so often it's always one option I turn on again immediately afterwards. As far as I'm concerned I don't need my graphics card pumping out 100+ frames per second if my monitor has a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz.

Turning off vertical sync has not eliminated the problem, instead whenever I get a frame rate drop it's down to 35fps or so, not 10fps as it was with vertical sync enabled.

I still stand by previous statements that the Imperial City update introduced an issue on the graphics performance side of things, but for the meanwhile I've managed to negate the impact of the problem somewhat.

Nutshotz

No response from zos go figure

Codius

At least i found the core issue of mine

Gilvoth

i am having the same exact problems. and i have been since beta. PC
the 64 bit client the say is coming in next patch might honestly fix alot of this. [hopefully]

Teulisch

i get the same problem. plus the game will occasionally lag out and crash to login. I contacted customer support on the 11th about it and have not heard back yet.....

i must conclude that customer support no longer exists, after a full 2 business weeks of no reply.