Possible "Fix" for FPS drop and texture issues in 32bit and 64bit clients

Alusi

This may well not work for everyone but heres is what happened for me the last few days.

Started playing Thieves Guild update on Sunday just gone and hearing about all the issues I thought perhaps I should update my GPU driver to the latest. Did this before I updated. Well it seems this is what has caused all the issues.

I would get 8-10fps on login on both 32bit and 64bit clients. Rather strangely if I alt-tabbed out of game and back in the fps drop would resolve itself and then return everytime i zoned ingame.

I just reverted to an older driver about 20mins ago after having all the same issues 40mins ago and all is resolved no FPS drop no pink horses.

Here are the details

GPU = nvidia GTX680
New driver used that exhibits issues = 364.51
Old driver used with no issues = 358.91

Other guild m8's I talked to about this said they were fine on the new driver, so if this works for you or not may well depend on your current GPU model.

Hope this helps some of you!

tspecherb14_ESO

I have the same issue. What I did, I reset it by switching to a different resolution and back. Thing is it kept "messing up" every time I zoned and had to redo it over. I'll try the alt tab. I have a GTX 680 4GB as well (recently updated, will try to roll back).

tspecherb14_ESO

Rolling back the driver seems to have worked for me. Driver 362.00

Syrani

Thanks for this!! I was having horrible lag today and came to the forums to try to find a fix. After reading your post, I found I had the 364.51 driver. I reverted back to 358.91 and my lag issues seem to be much better. I haven't played much since I reverted it back, but it seems my issue has been fixed!

Thanks again for posting this!
S.

Lennz

NVIDIA drives 358,91 OK?

Lennz

My video card is GTX 650 ti boost 2gb

KallistaBlackheart

the 358.91 driver is ok... didn't fix the issue for me. still randomly crashing. i can go all day without a crash or have five in an hour.....

lavenderkae

For the AMD people - I downloaded the 16.3 software hotfix for Crimson Edition (from March 9th), and on turned OFF "power efficiency" in the global settings, and have been able to play for 90 mins with no nakedness, tiny/missing heads, or pink objects in the 64bit client with 50-60 FPS (my normal) for the first time since Thieves Guild dropped. Maybe it'll work for other people too?

Edit/Followup: Nevermind, it's back this morning. *sigh* Back to the drawing board...

Syrani

*Update for me:

As I stated above, I reverted my driver back to 358.91. I have since had the chance to run a trial, and while my lag was a tiny bit better, it wasn't much better. Sill getting the slide show effect, game kept freezing, and one time (in the middle of a fight), the game locked up so bad that I had to shut it down in Task Manager and restart.

Out in the regular zones, my lag seems to be a decent bit better since I reverted the driver back, but still get some lag.

S.

Edit: I have been running the game from the launcher (and yes, I am shutting down the launcher after I click "Play"). Not sure if that is the 32 bit or not. 64 bit exe still gives me sound issues and lag, so I haven't been using it.

babylon

Still terrible performance (huge fps drops in large scale fights and even just from moving around (running/sprinting/on horse), when before the Thieves Guild patches/64bit client would at 99 fps in regular quest areas/in open and the usual fair bit lower in large city hubs (45-65fps in Rawl Kha for instance)...all settings maxed 32 CSAA (enhanced game AA) on a more than decent rig, 64bit client + win7 + nvidia 358.91 drivers. So where I would usually be fine with maxed settings I am no longer...and I suspect even lowering settings won't really change a lot about this anyway.

Now I'm seeing maxed fps in outdoors areas generally, but as said above quite large drops occur when moving and when fighting, so performance is impacted quite a bit during any movement/large scale fight event.

Kallion

I noticed that the fps drops on the 64bit client occur completely out of the blue in most occasions. In a second screen I placed both a CPU and a GPU monitor, to see the activities of both as I was playing.

Remarkable was the fact that when the frame drops occured, the graphics cards went down in usage, but the CPU remained at the same levels. So it is definitely not a CPU-GPU combo related issue. It has to do with internal memory clearing of redundant characters, tectures, objects etc that probably remain dormant and are not removed when we move away from an area.

During normal gaming, my CPU is @ 29-37% usage, while my GFX cards (SLI) work around 75-90% (first card) and 5-15% (second card). That's when I get the "normal" FPS (45-60 fps with vertical sync).
When the FPS drop occurs, my CPU remains at the same levels, while my GFX cards work around 32-45% (first card) and 1-3% (second card). The FPS at that stage is 15-21. And it persists until I restart the client. I've seen differences in the values of 21fps (with problems) and 60fps at the exact same spot, exact same settings, with the only difference being a restart.

My NVidia driver is the 358.91 & the system runs on Win10 with DirectX 12 installed (automatic from Windows Update) and the features implemented being DX11.

I do have to note one extra thing though. As the game loads, the client reaches 97-100% of my CPU, which means that the application can take advantage of all cores. Now, as to why it sticks around 30% of utilization during gaming, thus setting a supposed limit on the GFX cards, that's something I cannot explain.

amaniacub17_ESO

Just to add some additional info to this thread:

AMD Radeon R9 380x 4GBmem
AMD Driver 16.150.2111.0 (3/14/2016)
Windows 7 64bit
Core I7-950 (4 physical, 4 virtual cores)
12G memory
Resolution: 1280x1024, all settings maxed except no grass.

This is a new card since my old ones didn't support DX11.

Running around Hews Bane I've been getting 90+ FPS, but there are times, which seem totally random, where FPS drops to 10 or lower. I've been in a dungeon, outdoors, and was once standing still doing inventory. Whatever is happening, it doesn't appear to be related to anything specific in the game engine.

Eweroun

This weekend I found a little "trick" to get my FPS up again. Just change from Fullscreen to Windowed Fullscreen. If at any moment FPS drops again... just do the opposite..

Advantage is that it does not need a reload, so you lose about 5 secs.. (which I don't mind for getting my FPS back).
Even in cyrodill I remain having FPS of 60-80.
Elsewhere got even more..

Only problem I experience is a random screen lock-up everytime I run a dungeon.
Hope this helps you guys a bit.. but I hope mostly Zenimax is going to find the origin of the problem!

Allelya

I would like to add information about my current fix (not sure if permanent)

Specs:
Radeon R7 360
4GB RAM
Windows 10

Here is what I changed:
If you are familiar with the interface for the Radeon Graphics Settings window, be sure to add ESO and then click it to make the changes.

OpenGL Triple Buffering= On
Wait for Vertical Refresh=On, Unless Application Specifies

Then, Under Documents > Elder Scrolls Online > Live, open UserSettings.txt and make the following changes:

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET MIP_LOAD_SKIP_LEVELS "-3"
SET GPUSmoothingFrames "0"

Be sure to save a copy of the original before saving these changes.

These changes have so far worked for me. No FPS drops. I stay around 50-70 depending on where I'm at.

RSram

I'm also using a 680 card. I have the same issue since upgrading to Windows 10 all my games do the same thing. Random FPS drops. Microsoft had me do a clean reinstall of Windows 10, and that didn't work, and then they told me it was an NVidia problem or hardware problem. I spent about 40 hours troubleshooting memory, hardware, and tried a 690 card and still got the same issues. My event logs are now cleaner than NASA's clean room - no errors or warnings.

To fix the frame rate issue all I do is press the "Windows key + D'" to get to the desktop and then return to the game and the problem instantly goes away until I transition to another zone, or look at the map.

Another weird fix is if I run the Open Broadcast Software in preview mode and then run ESO, everything works perfectly even my other games.

I'll try the the older graphic card driver as suggest.

On a brighter note, I haven't experienced any crashes.

... and what is really bizarre is that I have no problems with Fallout 4 which uses the same, but modified Hero game engine. Go figure?

RSram

Just did a quick test and it looks like using the older 358.91 driver worked so far. Crossing my fingers!

Darkstorne

RSram wrote: »

... and what is really bizarre is that I have no problems with Fallout 4 which uses the same, but modified Hero game engine. Go figure?

Haha! First time I've heard that Nope, Fallout 4 uses a modified version of the Creation Engine that Skyrim ran on, which was a modified version of Fallout 3's engine, which was a modified version of Oblivion's engine, which was a modified version of Morrowind's engine, which was a modified version of the GameBryo engine

ESO's engine is unique. The Hero Engine was used for testing, but not for the final game.

I'm also noticing pretty extreme FPS drops with my GTX 970, and notice the card's usage is only between 30% and 40% when I'm stuck in the 20-30 fps range. It's usually up around the 60% mark when I'm hitting 50-60fps, which still means it's incredibly poorly optimized. Before the latest DLC 60fps was normal outside of towns, with drops to 40s common inside towns. Now 50fps is common outside towns, 20-30fps is common inside towns, and 60fps rarely happens