[FPS] Issues With Very Powerful PC

Cyrediath

Hello
I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.
I have intel i7 6700k skylake at 4.4ghz, 8gb nvidia gtx1080 and 2.666mhz 32gb ram windows 10 with dirx12. I tried every *solution* on websites and forums. I lowered all settings and tweaked usersettings.ini i am trying to find a solution for a year. With my old pc i was having this issue too. When in 4man dungeon or open world its fixed 75fps (refresh rate of my screen with g-sync) but when i go cyrodiil or cities fps drops to 20-30 but with spikes and its really annoying to play like that. It makes you tired and not want to play anymore. I dont think there is problem with pc because i just bought it and i downloaded eso, gta5, battlefield1. And other 2 games are working perfectly all the time ultra settings 75 fps stable. I only have problem with eso.

I tried nvidia settings for eso. Tried unparking cpu, did overclock cpu and gpu, did throttlestop (they are not throttling anyway its aroun 60degrees), i did user settings tweaks, i did ingame adjustments, lowered the srttings, i gave eso high priority from task manager, i disabled all addons, i dont run any program on background, pc is not getting hot, corrs are running on 4.4 ghz and gpu also fine they both ok. Is there someone there getting good fps in big cyrodiil fights or in big cities? If so how? Help me please i would be so grateful.

JasonSilverSpring

I think this is just an issue with this game in populated areas. I have an i7 5930k overclocked to 4.5 GHz and a Titan X Pascal playing at 4K and I often drop below 60 fps in cities while my GPU is not even at max clocks.

Dropping view distance might help some.

Cyrediath

JasonSilverSpring wrote: »

I think this is just an issue with this game in populated areas. I have an i7 5930k overclocked to 4.5 GHz and a Titan X Pascal playing at 4K and I often drop below 60 fps in cities while my GPU is not even at max clocks.

Dropping view distance might help some.

Hey, thanks for reply. I even prefer bad graphics, smooth gameplay over good graphics but i cant even achieve that. You are playing on 4k and if it drops around 50 on cities thats alright i guess for 4k. Did you do any tweaks?

JasonSilverSpring

Cyrediath wrote: »

JasonSilverSpring wrote: »

I think this is just an issue with this game in populated areas. I have an i7 5930k overclocked to 4.5 GHz and a Titan X Pascal playing at 4K and I often drop below 60 fps in cities while my GPU is not even at max clocks.

Dropping view distance might help some.

Hey, thanks for reply. I even prefer bad graphics, smooth gameplay over good graphics but i cant even achieve that. You are playing on 4k and if it drops around 50 on cities thats alright i guess for 4k. Did you do any tweaks?

No tweaks. All settings maxed. But I do unfortunately get drops below 50. Sometimes to 30 even. Other than view distance I don't think graphics settings will change the game issue.

alephthiago

Hey mate, check my post, its the same problem as you basically and its driving me mad
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308169/what-is-wrong-with-eso-fps/p1

timidobserver

Your issue is strange. My build is pretty similar to yours with less ram and a slightly older GPU. My FPS only goes under 30-40 if I am standing in the middle of a large faction zerg battle. However, my FPS never go under 45-60 in any area outside of Cyrodiil.

After your build did you benchmark your system to make sure that all of your hardware is performing up to expected levels under a heavy load? Are you running the ESO 64 Client?

Cyrediath

alephthiago wrote: »

Hey mate, check my post, its the same problem as you basically and its driving me mad
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308169/what-is-wrong-with-eso-fps/p1

Exactly! The difference is im using 6700k i7 as cpu and its pretty good for gaming if you ask me and it should be enough for eso atleast i expect to play maybe on medium settings without problem?

timidobserver wrote: »

Your issue is strange. My build is pretty similar to yours with less ram and a slightly older GPU. My FPS only goes under 30-40 if I am standing in the middle of a large faction zerg battle. However, my FPS never go under 45-60 in any area outside of Cyrodiil.

After your build did you benchmark your system to make sure that all of your hardware is performing up to expected levels under a heavy load? Are you running the ESO 64 Client?

Yes i did benchmark stress tests both cpu and gpu all fine and giving same/smilar results with other people using same hardware. For an example when i go to reapers march - rawl'kha city fps drops around 50 and i do few duels there and after some time fps drops around 35-40-45 and in cyrodiil when i see 20 people vs 20 people fps drops around 30. Its just not smooth. All stuttering and frame skipping maybe? It just makes me wanna not to play. I usually start eso, run in cyrodiil for an hour and close the game because of this bad performance. It makes me feel bad.

Cyrediath

Ohh and yea im using 64bit client and additional info, i lower my clock speed to see if something wrong with my cpu. I made my all cores run at 4.0 but nothing changed. Game is installed on ssd. I have extra cooling. Room temperature also not so high anyway.

In cyrodiil i saw max 80degree on my cpu. Gpu is 60 max70 always. But 80 also is not thermal throttling it shouldnt be because i dont see any drop in my clock rate and in benchmark tests or other heavy load programmes it *** 85-90 without problem.

timidobserver

Cyrediath wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

Hey mate, check my post, its the same problem as you basically and its driving me mad
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308169/what-is-wrong-with-eso-fps/p1

Exactly! The difference is im using 6700k i7 as cpu and its pretty good for gaming if you ask me and it should be enough for eso atleast i expect to play maybe on medium settings without problem?

timidobserver wrote: »

Your issue is strange. My build is pretty similar to yours with less ram and a slightly older GPU. My FPS only goes under 30-40 if I am standing in the middle of a large faction zerg battle. However, my FPS never go under 45-60 in any area outside of Cyrodiil.

After your build did you benchmark your system to make sure that all of your hardware is performing up to expected levels under a heavy load? Are you running the ESO 64 Client?

Yes i did benchmark stress tests both cpu and gpu all fine and giving same/smilar results with other people using same hardware. For an example when i go to reapers march - rawl'kha city fps drops around 50 and i do few duels there and after some time fps drops around 35-40-45 and in cyrodiil when i see 20 people vs 20 people fps drops around 30. Its just not smooth. All stuttering and frame skipping maybe? It just makes me wanna not to play. I usually start eso, run in cyrodiil for an hour and close the game because of this bad performance. It makes me feel bad.

FPS Drops down to like 40-50fps in a 20 vs 20 battle or in the middle of Reaper's march is normal regardless of how powerful your PC is. However, there shouldn't be any stuttering or skipping. I doubt it will change an ything, but you can try throttling your FPS down so that there isn't as much jumping(various things out there that can do this like MSI Afterburner) and you also try vertical sync mode in game.

alephthiago

Zos should really take a look at this
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom
@ZOS_GinaBruno

Cyrediath

timidobserver wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

alephthiago wrote: »

Hey mate, check my post, its the same problem as you basically and its driving me mad
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308169/what-is-wrong-with-eso-fps/p1

Exactly! The difference is im using 6700k i7 as cpu and its pretty good for gaming if you ask me and it should be enough for eso atleast i expect to play maybe on medium settings without problem?

timidobserver wrote: »

Your issue is strange. My build is pretty similar to yours with less ram and a slightly older GPU. My FPS only goes under 30-40 if I am standing in the middle of a large faction zerg battle. However, my FPS never go under 45-60 in any area outside of Cyrodiil.

After your build did you benchmark your system to make sure that all of your hardware is performing up to expected levels under a heavy load? Are you running the ESO 64 Client?

Yes i did benchmark stress tests both cpu and gpu all fine and giving same/smilar results with other people using same hardware. For an example when i go to reapers march - rawl'kha city fps drops around 50 and i do few duels there and after some time fps drops around 35-40-45 and in cyrodiil when i see 20 people vs 20 people fps drops around 30. Its just not smooth. All stuttering and frame skipping maybe? It just makes me wanna not to play. I usually start eso, run in cyrodiil for an hour and close the game because of this bad performance. It makes me feel bad.

FPS Drops down to like 40-50fps in a 20 vs 20 battle or in the middle of Reaper's march is normal regardless of how powerful your PC is. However, there shouldn't be any stuttering or skipping. I doubt it will change an ything, but you can try throttling your FPS down so that there isn't as much jumping(various things out there that can do this like MSI Afterburner) and you also try vertical sync mode in game.

I started vsync and anti aliasing and my game experience is smoother now. I dont see any stuttering or skipping but right now im in cyrodiil and while in castle, fighting with a zerg group im having 25 fps and its nearly unplayable. Okay its playable but not funny at all. Some people claim that they have around 40 fps in that fights with gtx 800 series or other older gpus and cpus than mine. Im still waiting a miracle like someone will say something like "uhh change this in settings" and i will be able to play eso smoothly. Its my favourite game and i really want to enjoy it. I guess you gotta buy +5.000$ pc to play this game.

Draxys

I don't have any troubleshooting ideas, just a bit of info from what I've heard over the past 2-3 years. Eso had this problem from the start- there is some kind of bottleneck that kills game performance on PCs that really should have zero problems running the game in all scenarios at 60 fps. People with mediocre computers to monster computers have had this issue, and no one has been able to definitively solve it, as far as I'm aware. So unfortunately, it is most likely not your problem, it's on zos.

Cyrediath

Draxys wrote: »

I don't have any troubleshooting ideas, just a bit of info from what I've heard over the past 2-3 years. Eso had this problem from the start- there is some kind of bottleneck that kills game performance on PCs that really should have zero problems running the game in all scenarios at 60 fps. People with mediocre computers to monster computers have had this issue, and no one has been able to definitively solve it, as far as I'm aware. So unfortunately, it is most likely not your problem, it's on zos.

Yea but that doesnt explain why there are people with stable 60-75 fps even in big zerg fight. Did you ever watch pvp stream on twitch? And check their specs. I saw sypher probably you know. He has gtx980 i have gtx1080 he has intel 6600hq 2.5ghz or something i have i7 6700k skylake 4.4 ghz. He has getting like x3 more performance out of game. I never see him havinf fps issues in cyrodiil also other streamers. And my internet is okay. Meh. 25mbit unlimited. I usually play with 70 ping.

If they make eso directx12 compatible would it help a bit maybe?

Cyrediath

Gently bump.
Any suggestions? I would reaaally grateful because i see youtubers and streamers playing smoother with worse setup so i think we can do this. I really like pvp but i cannot play in castle against a zerg group. Fps drops a lot to 20-30

Cyrediath

Still no solution. Can anyone help me please? I really love this game and i dont want to stop just because of this low fps...

Darsaga

I was locked at 60FPS with Vsync on. After turning it off I stay a solid 100 in PVE, drop to about 50ish around big fights in PVP. That is with 2 GTX1080's.

Cyrediath

Darsaga wrote: »

I was locked at 60FPS with Vsync on. After turning it off I stay a solid 100 in PVE, drop to about 50ish around big fights in PVP. That is with 2 GTX1080's.

with vsync it locks my fps to 75 but my problem is minimum fps not max. in cyrodiil around 10v10 i get around 50 fps but zergvzerg is unplayable like 20-30 fps also in crowded cities like rawl'kha while people dueling my fps is around 50.

raglau

Eso is CPU bound and the reason is that there is one main thread that saturates a single core. So even though I have a Core i7 6800K with 12 cores, I am limited to the processing throughput permitted by the clock speed of a single core, in my case I've overclocked to 4.6GHz. This gives me anything from 144FPS @ 2k down to about 40 FPS in busy areas on my GTX980Ti. At these low FPS occasions my GPU will be working at perhaps 30% while awaiting the CPU sending it geometric data to render.

There is no panacea, the game is badly coded in terms of multi-threading, in common with a lot of games from that era.

DX12 may help matters as DX12 can use multiple threads to send to the renderer, whereas DX11 is single threaded in this regard, but even then the game will need recoding to cater for this new found capability.

Don't hold your breath...

SirAndy

Cyrediath wrote: »

I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.

Should have searched the forums before you dropped all that money.

ESO lag and low FPS have nothing to do with your hardware, it runs just the same on my 6 year old backup PC with a crappy GPU than it does on my super duper top of the line hand build gaming rig.

Cyrediath

SirAndy wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.

Should have searched the forums before you dropped all that money.

ESO lag and low FPS have nothing to do with your hardware, it runs just the same on my 6 year old backup PC with a crappy GPU than it does on my super duper top of the line hand build gaming rig.

Pibbles wrote: »

Eso is CPU bound and the reason is that there is one main thread that saturates a single core. So even though I have a Core i7 6800K with 12 cores, I am limited to the processing throughput permitted by the clock speed of a single core, in my case I've overclocked to 4.6GHz. This gives me anything from 144FPS @ 2k down to about 40 FPS in busy areas on my GTX980Ti. At these low FPS occasions my GPU will be working at perhaps 30% while awaiting the CPU sending it geometric data to render.

There is no panacea, the game is badly coded in terms of multi-threading, in common with a lot of games from that era.

DX12 may help matters as DX12 can use multiple threads to send to the renderer, whereas DX11 is single threaded in this regard, but even then the game will need recoding to cater for this new found capability.

Don't hold your breath...

See? Same cpu with older gpu but claiming getting 50 fps in very busy areas. I just dont know why i am getting 20-30 fps at zergvszerg in cyrodiil. I just want it to be playable thats all

raglau

Cyrediath wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.

Should have searched the forums before you dropped all that money.

ESO lag and low FPS have nothing to do with your hardware, it runs just the same on my 6 year old backup PC with a crappy GPU than it does on my super duper top of the line hand build gaming rig.

Pibbles wrote: »

Eso is CPU bound and the reason is that there is one main thread that saturates a single core. So even though I have a Core i7 6800K with 12 cores, I am limited to the processing throughput permitted by the clock speed of a single core, in my case I've overclocked to 4.6GHz. This gives me anything from 144FPS @ 2k down to about 40 FPS in busy areas on my GTX980Ti. At these low FPS occasions my GPU will be working at perhaps 30% while awaiting the CPU sending it geometric data to render.

There is no panacea, the game is badly coded in terms of multi-threading, in common with a lot of games from that era.

DX12 may help matters as DX12 can use multiple threads to send to the renderer, whereas DX11 is single threaded in this regard, but even then the game will need recoding to cater for this new found capability.

Don't hold your breath...

See? Same cpu with older gpu but claiming getting 50 fps in very busy areas. I just dont know why i am getting 20-30 fps at zergvszerg in cyrodiil. I just want it to be playable thats all

If I were to go into Cyrodiil I'd get the same awful FPS as you. In fact, I was by Breda, the New Life quest giver, last night and I dropped down to 25FPS.

But really, old or new GPU makes no odds, the lowest frame rate in this game is determined by CPU single core clock speed, whereas with most games it's determined by the GPU.

Cyrediath

Pibbles wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.

Should have searched the forums before you dropped all that money.

ESO lag and low FPS have nothing to do with your hardware, it runs just the same on my 6 year old backup PC with a crappy GPU than it does on my super duper top of the line hand build gaming rig.

Pibbles wrote: »

Eso is CPU bound and the reason is that there is one main thread that saturates a single core. So even though I have a Core i7 6800K with 12 cores, I am limited to the processing throughput permitted by the clock speed of a single core, in my case I've overclocked to 4.6GHz. This gives me anything from 144FPS @ 2k down to about 40 FPS in busy areas on my GTX980Ti. At these low FPS occasions my GPU will be working at perhaps 30% while awaiting the CPU sending it geometric data to render.

There is no panacea, the game is badly coded in terms of multi-threading, in common with a lot of games from that era.

DX12 may help matters as DX12 can use multiple threads to send to the renderer, whereas DX11 is single threaded in this regard, but even then the game will need recoding to cater for this new found capability.

Don't hold your breath...

See? Same cpu with older gpu but claiming getting 50 fps in very busy areas. I just dont know why i am getting 20-30 fps at zergvszerg in cyrodiil. I just want it to be playable thats all

If I were to go into Cyrodiil I'd get the same awful FPS as you. In fact, I was by Breda, the New Life quest giver, last night and I dropped down to 25FPS.

But really, old or new GPU makes no odds, the lowest frame rate in this game is determined by CPU single core clock speed, whereas with most games it's determined by the GPU.

And probably they never leap into dx12 because dx11 still very common.

So how does the streamers getting good fps at cyrodiil while fighting and streaming at the same time?

raglau

Cyrediath wrote: »

Pibbles wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

I bought new pc just to play eso smoothly.

Should have searched the forums before you dropped all that money.

ESO lag and low FPS have nothing to do with your hardware, it runs just the same on my 6 year old backup PC with a crappy GPU than it does on my super duper top of the line hand build gaming rig.

Pibbles wrote: »

Eso is CPU bound and the reason is that there is one main thread that saturates a single core. So even though I have a Core i7 6800K with 12 cores, I am limited to the processing throughput permitted by the clock speed of a single core, in my case I've overclocked to 4.6GHz. This gives me anything from 144FPS @ 2k down to about 40 FPS in busy areas on my GTX980Ti. At these low FPS occasions my GPU will be working at perhaps 30% while awaiting the CPU sending it geometric data to render.

There is no panacea, the game is badly coded in terms of multi-threading, in common with a lot of games from that era.

DX12 may help matters as DX12 can use multiple threads to send to the renderer, whereas DX11 is single threaded in this regard, but even then the game will need recoding to cater for this new found capability.

Don't hold your breath...

See? Same cpu with older gpu but claiming getting 50 fps in very busy areas. I just dont know why i am getting 20-30 fps at zergvszerg in cyrodiil. I just want it to be playable thats all

If I were to go into Cyrodiil I'd get the same awful FPS as you. In fact, I was by Breda, the New Life quest giver, last night and I dropped down to 25FPS.

But really, old or new GPU makes no odds, the lowest frame rate in this game is determined by CPU single core clock speed, whereas with most games it's determined by the GPU.

And probably they never leap into dx12 because dx11 still very common.

So how does the streamers getting good fps at cyrodiil while fighting and streaming at the same time?

Well, a streamer will have a strong multicore CPU, so whilst ESO is saturating one core, the streaming will use the others. e.g. I was rendering a large video project the other day, I told the software to use 10 cores, leaving 2 free, one for ESO and the other for background activity, the game ran precisely as it always does, despite the heavy duty rendering consuming the bulk of the CPU.

ZOS have talked about going to DX12, it definitely opens doors, but they'd still need to do some recoding. But the multicore graphics APIs like Vulkan & DX12 can alleviate issues. I can run Doom on Vulkan at 2k with all bells on and get permanently over 100FPS, right up to 144FPS at many times, and this runs evenly across all CPU cores. So I can see the potential here, but I rather think we'll only see this potential utilised with games that have the opportunity to design this sort of thing in from the ground up. It's a lot harder to retrofit...

Vasoka

This is the game's engine, not your PC.

I've had this issue over several systems, all of them very beastly for their current period + 1 laptop.

Currently I am with an OC-ed to 4.8 i7-4790k, an OC-ed gtx1070 gaming X, an SSD and 32GB of 1866 RAM.

While my fps is perfectly steady and free of stutter outside of cities and cyrodil (locked on 100), holy *** *** what happens when I enter a city is ridiculous.

The most interesting thing I've noticed, however, is that when I've played for a while... say an hour or so, and I enter the city, fps takes a heavy hit and drops down to 50 or so. When I restart my game, however, in the same city I have 60 fps and 0 problems at all.. until I play for a while and enter another city, that is.

This occurred with my old GPU as well (a gtx970). I am simply at a loss, I don't think there is any fix for all of this - it's simply the engine and a memory leak which will never get fixed, most likely.

Cyrediath

Vasoka wrote: »

This is the game's engine, not your PC.

I've had this issue over several systems, all of them very beastly for their current period + 1 laptop.

Currently I am with an OC-ed to 4.8 i7-4790k, an OC-ed gtx1070 gaming X, an SSD and 32GB of 1866 RAM.

While my fps is perfectly steady and free of stutter outside of cities and cyrodil (locked on 100), holy *** *** what happens when I enter a city is ridiculous.

The most interesting thing I've noticed, however, is that when I've played for a while... say an hour or so, and I enter the city, fps takes a heavy hit and drops down to 50 or so. When I restart my game, however, in the same city I have 60 fps and 0 problems at all.. until I play for a while and enter another city, that is.

This occurred with my old GPU as well (a gtx970). I am simply at a loss, I don't think there is any fix for all of this - it's simply the engine and a memory leak which will never get fixed, most likely.

Thiss... this one knows my problem ehehe exactly! I have the same problems. It feels so weird knowing that 40v40 fight in cyrodiil and every person having really bad fps at that moment. I hope they fix it somehow. Some mmorpgs dont have this problem like world of warcraft, knight online, silkroad, gta5 online (heey still counts with that amazing graphics), battlefield 1 and 4 (rpg 64vs64 people with huge maps planes tanks etc) and also games like eso and tera (another mmorpg) have this problem.

itz_Lobster

I noticed that my gpu utilization goes to 30 percent and sometimes below. Even with dsr enabled.

Cyrediath

itz_Lobster wrote: »

I noticed that my gpu utilization goes to 30 percent and sometimes below. Even with dsr enabled.

The problem is not gpu but cpu. And yea also my cpu gpu and ram doesnt go more than %50 yet still having fps issues...

itz_Lobster

Cyrediath wrote: »

itz_Lobster wrote: »

I noticed that my gpu utilization goes to 30 percent and sometimes below. Even with dsr enabled.

The problem is not gpu but cpu. And yea also my cpu gpu and ram doesnt go more than %50 yet still having fps issues...

yes, just saying that when it happens my gpu goes from 80 to 100% down to 30% or below, and that is odd.

raglau

itz_Lobster wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

itz_Lobster wrote: »

I noticed that my gpu utilization goes to 30 percent and sometimes below. Even with dsr enabled.

The problem is not gpu but cpu. And yea also my cpu gpu and ram doesnt go more than %50 yet still having fps issues...

yes, just saying that when it happens my gpu goes from 80 to 100% down to 30% or below, and that is odd.

It's not odd when you think about the way graphics are rendered, at an architectural level, (and likely a coder could explain in more detail):

1 - CPU computes geometric data that is required to be rendered
2 - App puts the geometric data in the command buffer for the renderer
3 - GPU retrieves the geometric data and renders it

As the DX11 renderer is single-threaded and ESO does not seem that well optimised but is still quite pretty with it, one CPU core becomes maxed out in these activities and limits the flow of geometry data to the GPU, therefore the GPU idles while it awaits more data.

When ESO came out I did a lot of detailed analysis with Perfmon and the application internally behaves as it ought, it's just that the overall flow of information has these constraints that cause these bottlenecks.

DX12 and Vulkan both have multithreaded renderers, so I'm sure you can immediately see the *potential* to resolve your issue as we can chuck more stuff at the GPU and therefore these idle times can be filled with glorious rendering activity. Well, the app needs to be aware it's sticking things in multiple command buffers for parallel execution, and sure, ZOS can code that, but then what if other pieces of the app architecture are not coded in a way that facilitates their parallel flow of info etc.?

I am not convinced we'll ever see ESO improved greatly in performance terms. Certainly ESO will move to DX12 at some point as ZOS need to remain vendor supported by Microsoft, but re-architecting the app for true multithreaded performance will be costly, risky and deliver benefit to mainly PvP players, who make up a very small part of the customer base and therefore are probably not that much of a priority for ZOS.

Cyrediath

Pibbles wrote: »

itz_Lobster wrote: »

Cyrediath wrote: »

itz_Lobster wrote: »

I noticed that my gpu utilization goes to 30 percent and sometimes below. Even with dsr enabled.

The problem is not gpu but cpu. And yea also my cpu gpu and ram doesnt go more than %50 yet still having fps issues...

yes, just saying that when it happens my gpu goes from 80 to 100% down to 30% or below, and that is odd.

It's not add when you think about the way graphics are rendered, at an architectural level, (and likely a coder could explain in more detail):

1 - CPU computes geometric data that is required to be rendered
2 - App puts the geometric data in the command buffer for the renderer
3 - GPU retreives the geometric data and renders it

As the DX11 renderer is single-threaded and ESO does not seem that well optimised but is still quite pretty with it, one CPU core becomes maxed out in these activities and limits the flow of geometry data to the GPU, therefore the GPU idles while it awaits more data.

When ESO came out I did a lot of detailed analysis with Perfmon and the application internally behaves as it ought, it's just that the overall flow of information has these constraints that cause these bottlenecks.

DX12 and Vulkan both have multithreaded renderers, so I'm sure you can immediately see the *potential* to resolve your issue as we can chuck more stuff at the GPU and therefore these idle times can be filled with glorious rendering activity. Well, the app needs to be aware it's sticking things in multiple command buffers for parallel execution, and sure, ZOS can code that, but then what if other pieces of the app architecture are not coded in a way that facilitates their parallel flow of info etc.?

I am not convinced we'll ever see ESO improved greatly in performance terms. Certainly ESO will move to DX12 at some point as ZOS need to remain vendor supported by Microsoft, but re-architecting the app for true multithreaded performance will be costly, risky and deliver benefit to mainly PvP players, who make up a very small part of the customer base and therefore are probably not that much of a priority for ZOS.

It was really sad to read this and its true.

Gargath

As I read this, the funny thing is that my 5-y.o. PC with i5-3570@3.40, 8 GB Ram, GTX660Ti 2GB and standard HDD, with 15MBit stable cable connection from PL to DE, offers similar fps/playing experience in ESO. High lvl of graphics, stable fps out of zergs/ main cities. And a complete fps frop with zergs/main cities.
Actually I found Dhalmora in Bal Foyen the best (i.e. most fps stable) bank area in entire game.