What is wrong with ESO FPS?

FuriousMonk313

Well I'm not glad to hear that a lot of other people are having issues with the FPS in-game, but I'm also glad to know that wasn't my hardware that was causing the frames to drop. I have a Gigabyte 980 ti and strictly only do pve, but notice that when I'm doing Dolmens, trials and etc.... my frame would drop down to around 24-30 fps. So I could imagine how stressful it would be trying to play pvp content.

Darkstorne

alephthiago wrote: »

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Now don't get me wrong, that CPU u have is very old but still the way this game is coded just sucks. It basically drains your CPU. Now, having that beast of a card you have a bottleneck because it just cant keep up with your video card. You need to upgrade it, or most likely should.

So, do you think getting a i5-6600 SKYLAKE 3.3GHz Cache 6MB would be better?
Because i dont see much difference, sandy bridges still hold fine.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K/3514vs619

Stop looking at i5 CPUs for this game. The main problem is indeed server side, followed in close second by the atrocious CPU handling. An i7 will perform better thanks to the larger cache sizes, even an i7 2600k. Hyperthreading may also help out, but even if ESO does use multi cores to some extent, the vast majority of the game runs on a single core, so extra cores aren't a good solution and might provide zero benefits anyway.

In summary, for extra performance in ESO

• A new GPU will probably do absolutely nothing for framerate. Just allows you to run at higher resolutions.
• ZOS need to implement DX12 so they can finally do something about multi core support.
• ZOS need to address their server side code to improve performance for busy locations, but despite numerous PVP focused "performance patches" they've been unable to sort this out. I have no idea why they're struggling so much, but they've made it clear they have no intention of filling us in on the details.

So if you want better performance your best bets are upgrading to an i7 with an 8MB cache, crossing your fingers for a DX12 PTS announcement, and then keeping them crossed that the so-far inept programmers have used DX12 to implement proper multi core support. The server side issues are probably never going to be fixed.

dsalter

your CPU could use alittle buff. it's bottlenecking

Sharee

Just fyi, there is some sort of memory leak or something happening in the client that can murder your framerate even if nothing else affects it.

Example: GTX 1050Ti.
I am standing inside (empty) rayles, my FPS is in the low teens. I try everything - going to minimum settings, etc, nothing helps much.

I quit the game, start it again, log in the exact same spot just a minute later, and my FPS is 60-80(on ultra setting). Nothing changed except simply restarting the client, and my FPS is suddenly fine.

Darethran

FriedEggSandwich wrote: »

You sound much more knowledgable than I am, but with all due respect, do you think the game makes drastically more draw calls now than it did back when the game had no lag? When I started playing at launch lag was almost non-existent and the amount of players on screen, especially in pvp, was just more. The lag was introduced shortly after the lighting patch, but devs deny this had anything to do with it. The game has gone through major adjustments since (cp system, dx11, x64 etc), but lag became a feature of pvp way before any of those major changes. We all know how laggy TF can get, it's why it's more laggy for some than others with similar systems that is puzzling.

According to the ol' Google, the lighting patch was added in 2014, which implemented lights that make use of shadow maps, rather than having lights that just contrast with the object's ambient lighting. This was applied to all lights; particle effects, torches, that sorta thing.

In which case, that will absolutely have increased draw calls exponentially. Group of twenty players in one spot, and one of them casts an AOE that has a faint light.

((1 + number of lights) * (20 players * 11 objects) ) + ((1 + number of shadowmaps) * (20 players * 11 objects)).

Assuming one light 'n' shadowmap casting light being used in that group of 20 players, we get:

(2 * 44) + (2 * 44) = 176 extra draw calls when one player cast an aoe spell.

Now factor in siege, other players using AOEs, small skills, objects, terrain, grass, other lights, etc., and the draw calls are going way high.

Of course, that all assumes that there was hardly any dynamic lighting being used prior to the patch, for skills, and in PvP areas, at the least.


But now that I think about it, it's rather odd that OP is getting five fps. I've been on Trueflame, and I'm running a Phenom II x4 965 BE; where I'm getting 8fps, he should be getting 30fps, what with intel CPUs being >3x better at handling draw calls than AMD CPUs, regardless of their number crunching performance.

@OP What are your temps for your gear, when the framerate goes down to single digits?

Darethran

alephthiago wrote: »

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Now don't get me wrong, that CPU u have is very old but still the way this game is coded just sucks. It basically drains your CPU. Now, having that beast of a card you have a bottleneck because it just cant keep up with your video card. You need to upgrade it, or most likely should.

So, do you think getting a i5-6600 SKYLAKE 3.3GHz Cache 6MB would be better?
Because i dont see much difference, sandy bridges still hold fine.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K/3514vs619

There is pretty much no reason to upgrade to another quad core, and for ESO, there's no reason to upgrade to a better CPU at all; you'll get hardly any benefit.

Running an i3 2100, C2Q Q6600, anything AMD (dunno how Zen's gonna play out), sure. But an i5 2500k? No point.



Outside of emulation, the average increase in benchmark scores are 20% from Sandybridge -> Skylake. That's the best case scenario, which games will not ever reac due to much more complicated work being done. 'Course, if you get some hyper fast DDR4 with low latencies, you might get close to that +20% performance gain, but that's the ol' diminishing returns thing.

AlexTech0x

alephthiago wrote: »

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Now don't get me wrong, that CPU u have is very old but still the way this game is coded just sucks. It basically drains your CPU. Now, having that beast of a card you have a bottleneck because it just cant keep up with your video card. You need to upgrade it, or most likely should.

So, do you think getting a i5-6600 SKYLAKE 3.3GHz Cache 6MB would be better?
Because i dont see much difference, sandy bridges still hold fine.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-6600-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K/3514vs619

In general its better, yeah. But like i said, this game is very badly designed.
Remember Crysis when it came out, there was no machine that could run it smoothly lol.

Darethran

SirAndy wrote: »

MajinCry wrote: »

I sincerely doubt that the game halts whilst it waits for packets to be sent/received during the vast majority of gameplay. Perhaps during a loadscreen, or when a keep changes ownership, but just running about cyrodiil?

Your personal doubts are meaningless, this has been discussed here ad nauseum, especially during the times when some of this "lag" was introduced.

The first round came with the anti-bot patch after PC release and the second round came with the now infamous "lightning" patch.

Several members here, myself included, have done extensive testing of the ESO client/server code and like i said above, the drop in FPS can be directly linked to packet latency.

Please provide references for your claim that the above is not true ...

Prove a negative? Bit much.

Tho', I'm rather intrigued. Mind linking me to the threads with the info and numbers on this? Also, in what scenarios does the rendering halt? Is it when there's an influx of a specific type of packet; keep ownership change, player positions, skill usage, etc.?

alephthiago

MajinCry wrote: »

FriedEggSandwich wrote: »

You sound much more knowledgable than I am, but with all due respect, do you think the game makes drastically more draw calls now than it did back when the game had no lag? When I started playing at launch lag was almost non-existent and the amount of players on screen, especially in pvp, was just more. The lag was introduced shortly after the lighting patch, but devs deny this had anything to do with it. The game has gone through major adjustments since (cp system, dx11, x64 etc), but lag became a feature of pvp way before any of those major changes. We all know how laggy TF can get, it's why it's more laggy for some than others with similar systems that is puzzling.

According to the ol' Google, the lighting patch was added in 2014, which implemented lights that make use of shadow maps, rather than having lights that just contrast with the object's ambient lighting. This was applied to all lights; particle effects, torches, that sorta thing.

In which case, that will absolutely have increased draw calls exponentially. Group of twenty players in one spot, and one of them casts an AOE that has a faint light.

((1 + number of lights) * (20 players * 11 objects) ) + ((1 + number of shadowmaps) * (20 players * 11 objects)).

Assuming one light 'n' shadowmap casting light being used in that group of 20 players, we get:

(2 * 44) + (2 * 44) = 176 extra draw calls when one player cast an aoe spell.

Now factor in siege, other players using AOEs, small skills, objects, terrain, grass, other lights, etc., and the draw calls are going way high.

Of course, that all assumes that there was hardly any dynamic lighting being used prior to the patch, for skills, and in PvP areas, at the least.


But now that I think about it, it's rather odd that OP is getting five fps. I've been on Trueflame, and I'm running a Phenom II x4 965 BE; where I'm getting 8fps, he should be getting 30fps, what with intel CPUs being >3x better at handling draw calls than AMD CPUs, regardless of their number crunching performance.

@OP What are your temps for your gear, when the framerate goes down to single digits?

Temperatures dont actually change in my setup, they stay stable during all gameplay, cpu usage doesnt go over 45% too

raglau

ESO is CPU bound, not GPU bound. It has one main thread that maxes out a single core, thus preventing consistent feed of geometry data to the GPU, so even the best GPU in the world will sit there twiddling its thumbs waiting on your CPU.

ESO likes high clock-speed architectures that favour single-threaded execution, which to be fair you do have, despite the age. But I think if you run Perfmon/Taskman & Afterburner, you'll see one core at 100% and your GPU under-utilised.

If it makes you feel any better, I have 12 CPU cores (hyperthreaded) and 64GB RAM with a GTX980Ti but I have 11 unused CPU cores in ESO and a GTX980Ti that has enough spare bandwidth to drive to the shops, come home and make me a cup of tea!

raglau

alephthiago wrote: »

MajinCry wrote: »

FriedEggSandwich wrote: »

You sound much more knowledgable than I am, but with all due respect, do you think the game makes drastically more draw calls now than it did back when the game had no lag? When I started playing at launch lag was almost non-existent and the amount of players on screen, especially in pvp, was just more. The lag was introduced shortly after the lighting patch, but devs deny this had anything to do with it. The game has gone through major adjustments since (cp system, dx11, x64 etc), but lag became a feature of pvp way before any of those major changes. We all know how laggy TF can get, it's why it's more laggy for some than others with similar systems that is puzzling.

According to the ol' Google, the lighting patch was added in 2014, which implemented lights that make use of shadow maps, rather than having lights that just contrast with the object's ambient lighting. This was applied to all lights; particle effects, torches, that sorta thing.

In which case, that will absolutely have increased draw calls exponentially. Group of twenty players in one spot, and one of them casts an AOE that has a faint light.

((1 + number of lights) * (20 players * 11 objects) ) + ((1 + number of shadowmaps) * (20 players * 11 objects)).

Assuming one light 'n' shadowmap casting light being used in that group of 20 players, we get:

(2 * 44) + (2 * 44) = 176 extra draw calls when one player cast an aoe spell.

Now factor in siege, other players using AOEs, small skills, objects, terrain, grass, other lights, etc., and the draw calls are going way high.

Of course, that all assumes that there was hardly any dynamic lighting being used prior to the patch, for skills, and in PvP areas, at the least.


But now that I think about it, it's rather odd that OP is getting five fps. I've been on Trueflame, and I'm running a Phenom II x4 965 BE; where I'm getting 8fps, he should be getting 30fps, what with intel CPUs being >3x better at handling draw calls than AMD CPUs, regardless of their number crunching performance.

@OP What are your temps for your gear, when the framerate goes down to single digits?

Temperatures dont actually change in my setup, they stay stable during all gameplay, cpu usage doesnt go over 45% too

Is that aggregated 45% though? Get Taskman.exe to show you logical cores, to get the real picture, or log some more detailed tests in Perfmon.

alephthiago

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Is that aggregated 45% though? Get Taskman.exe to show you logical cores, to get the real picture, or log some more detailed tests in Perfmon.

I am monitoring ingame all cores using the rivaturner now, as soon as we have a big battle im gonna take screenshots and post it here

rescuer1156ub17_ESO

I unparked my cores and noticed a substantial increase in framerates. might be worth a try. although I'm not and expert by any means and was following the tips given in the reddit post.

Vaoh

SirAndy wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

So i got the new gtx1070 graphics card in hopes my fps in pvp would improve a lot and give me an actual fighting chance in keep fights for example where my fps would go all the way down to 5-7 fps, my old card was HD7850.

Should have done a search here first before spending all that coin ...

It's actually the client/server netcode that is the bottleneck and dragging down FPS. All around god awful implementation.

What's even worse, we (myself and a few other programmers) have warned ZOS about this since early beta.

I'm not very knowledgeable on how this stuff works. I just know that my performance on console is not a stranger to stable 5FPS battles in both Vet trials and PvP.

Is there any way ZOS can fix this?

Doctordarkspawn

Vaoh wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

So i got the new gtx1070 graphics card in hopes my fps in pvp would improve a lot and give me an actual fighting chance in keep fights for example where my fps would go all the way down to 5-7 fps, my old card was HD7850.

Should have done a search here first before spending all that coin ...

It's actually the client/server netcode that is the bottleneck and dragging down FPS. All around god awful implementation.

What's even worse, we (myself and a few other programmers) have warned ZOS about this since early beta.

I'm not very knowledgeable on how this stuff works. I just know that my performance on console is not a stranger to stable 5FPS battles in both Vet trials and PvP.

Is there any way ZOS can fix this?

Honestly?

The best thing they could do would be to re-enable the direct x 9 Support, then quit it with the netcode bollocks.

On the graphics bit, I know a friend who's GPU has outright died on trial runs because of the draw calls and all that bollocks. This game is just badly made, and I wish they'd just take it offline and fix it.

But we both know they wont do that. That'd require them admiting to themselves they were wrong, and that'll never happen. MMO devs will kill their game with a sledgehammer before ever admitting fault.

rescuer1156ub17_ESO

Sharee wrote: »

Just fyi, there is some sort of memory leak or something happening in the client that can murder your framerate even if nothing else affects it.

Example: GTX 1050Ti.
I am standing inside (empty) rayles, my FPS is in the low teens. I try everything - going to minimum settings, etc, nothing helps much.

I quit the game, start it again, log in the exact same spot just a minute later, and my FPS is 60-80(on ultra setting). Nothing changed except simply restarting the client, and my FPS is suddenly fine.

agreed. same happens to me as well. by using the /reloadui command in the chat bar I usually gain upwards of 20fps when this happens.

runagate

Ah, remember the good old days in PvP? You're oldschool if you remember getting 2 FPS all the time for weeks on end. Sometimes you'd have control of what was happening and you'd get so, so excited.

Rohamad_Ali

This is my My ASUS specs

Windowsows 10 Pro operating system
2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ Skylake quad-core processor, up to 3.5GHz with Turbo
17.3" diagonal matte Full HD G-SYNC display with 1920x1080 resolution
16GB DDR4 DRAM; expandable to 64GB
1TB 7200 RPM hard drive
DVD+/-RW drive
802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 4.1 wireless technology
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics with 8GB GDDR5 memory
Built-in speaker and subwoofer
HD webcam with array microphone
Illuminated chiclet keyboard
Rechargeable eight-cell lithium-ion battery
SD/MMC memory card slot
USB 3.1 Type-C port
Four USB 3.0 ports
HDMI, mini Display Port, ethernet ports
Two headphone jacks
Microphone jack

It still gets FPS drops in big battles .

alephthiago

rescuer1156ub17_ESO wrote: »

I unparked my cores and noticed a substantial increase in framerates. might be worth a try. although I'm not and expert by any means and was following the tips given in the reddit post.

They are unparked

alephthiago

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

This is my My ASUS specs
2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ Skylake quad-core processor, up to 3.5GHz with Turbo

Rohamad send me one I7 just like yours, the dominion needs all help it can get

Rohamad_Ali

alephthiago wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

This is my My ASUS specs
2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ Skylake quad-core processor, up to 3.5GHz with Turbo

Rohamad send me one I7 just like yours, the dominion needs all help it can get

I broke the plastic with this one . We need a Dominion GoFundMe page .

alephthiago

alephthiago wrote: »

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Is that aggregated 45% though? Get Taskman.exe to show you logical cores, to get the real picture, or log some more detailed tests in Perfmon.

I am monitoring ingame all cores using the rivaturner now, as soon as we have a big battle im gonna take screenshots and post it here

So...the funny thing is all data overlaid by rivaturner doesnt appear in my screenshots lol
But even in those HEAVY situations they are ALL still at 40-60%, the only time i see my cores at 90-100% is at loading screens, when changing maps or porting from one keep to the other.

Bryanonymous

MEMORY LEAK
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ParaNostram

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

You bought the same one as me probably . Yes it is as Sir Andy has spoken . The net code restroom backs up more then a stadium restroom at half time during big battles .

All the more need for battlegrounds

AuldWolf

MajinCry beat me to this. People should really be paying attention to his post. It's the D3D11 implementation across various cards that's causing this weirdness. The OP's CPU is fine, and their graphics card is fine, too. It's just that ESO is bound to an ancient engine (HeroEngine) and running on what I'd hardly call the most optimal graphics API solution out there.

The hilarious talking point, for me, is that their D3D9 build -- before they abandoned it -- actually seemed to yield better performance. A temporary solution would be to bring that back whilst they look into Vulkan/D3D12. I also imagine that there are problems with how the engine handles things itself due to it being so ancient, which may just work better with certain configurations of hardware. It's not like we haven't seen that a million times before as PC gamers. Hint: We have, a lot. It's pretty common. Especially with outdated engines/APIs.

Honestly, I'd love to see the performance comparisons between their D3D9 and D3D11 renderers.

Sharee

AuldWolf wrote: »

MajinCry beat me to this. People should really be paying attention to his post. It's the D3D11 implementation across various cards that's causing this weirdness. The OP's CPU is fine, and their graphics card is fine, too. It's just that ESO is bound to an ancient engine (HeroEngine) and running on what I'd hardly call the most optimal graphics API solution out there.

ESO does not use Hero engine. It was used during development (they needed something to work with while the actual engine was being developed), but the final game does not use it.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Doesn-t-Use-the-Hero-Engine-Developer-Says-272344.shtml

raglau

Vaoh wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

So i got the new gtx1070 graphics card in hopes my fps in pvp would improve a lot and give me an actual fighting chance in keep fights for example where my fps would go all the way down to 5-7 fps, my old card was HD7850.

Should have done a search here first before spending all that coin ...

It's actually the client/server netcode that is the bottleneck and dragging down FPS. All around god awful implementation.

What's even worse, we (myself and a few other programmers) have warned ZOS about this since early beta.

I'm not very knowledgeable on how this stuff works. I just know that my performance on console is not a stranger to stable 5FPS battles in both Vet trials and PvP.

Is there any way ZOS can fix this?

DX12 will help.

DX11 only permits a single thread to pass data to the renderer, this limitation is removed with DX12. However, it's not as simple as just talking to the DX12 API, the game would need recoding in order that other sub-components do not cause waits in other areas. e.g. the game may find it has this glorious wide path to send geometric data to the renderer using all threads, but there's a single-threaded bit of code elswhere that causes a load of 'wait states' in other threads, and performance barely improves.

What I will say is that when I deployed the Vulkan (another multi-threaded renderer) version of Doom on my 12 core 6800K, the experience was a glorious uplift in performance. I can run the game at 144fps in 2k with everything turned on and the CPU does not break a sweat; all CPU activity is evenly spread across the 12 cores (hyperthreading here) at about 25% per core.

However, we must remember Doom had the luxury of a greenfield multithread Vulkan design, this is not the case with ESO and I doubt they'd be able to retrofit the game so perfectly to the DX12 API, plus it would introduce a lot of risk re. bugs etc.

raglau

alephthiago wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

AlexTech0x wrote: »

Is that aggregated 45% though? Get Taskman.exe to show you logical cores, to get the real picture, or log some more detailed tests in Perfmon.

I am monitoring ingame all cores using the rivaturner now, as soon as we have a big battle im gonna take screenshots and post it here

So...the funny thing is all data overlaid by rivaturner doesnt appear in my screenshots lol
But even in those HEAVY situations they are ALL still at 40-60%, the only time i see my cores at 90-100% is at loading screens, when changing maps or porting from one keep to the other.

At these times, how hard is the GPU working? We need to see the GPU vs CPU performance over time.

tunepunk

I had some FPS issues as well and noticed that if i ALT+Tab out of ESO and back in the FPS jumps back up to normal... Must be a bug or something.

My Normal FPS around 40. Goes down to around 10 FPS, Alt+Tab and back in to ESO and I'm back at 40 again.

AzuraKin

alephthiago wrote: »

So i got the new gtx1070 graphics card in hopes my fps in pvp would improve a lot and give me an actual fighting chance in keep fights for example where my fps would go all the way down to 5-7 fps, my old card was HD7850.
After downloading and installing the drivers, adjusting settings and seeing how beautiful the game was in pve it was time to check the improvement in pvp...Surprise! It did almost NOTHING even setting view distance, shade quality, particles etc etc to medium-low quality.

I did try everything is this guide too, changing the ini settings, nvidia program profile, settings ingame, unpark cpu and etc https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/3jjoql/are_you_having_fps_issues_wih_eso_on_a_pc_well/

My system is I52500k overclocked, 16GB RAM, asus gtx1070.











My question is: Do you get better results in big battles? How?
Why is ESO so poorly optimized?

well where were you, how many people around, what were they doing? a lot of things effect lag. and there is no magic fix for all lag.