A post from a graphics dev about progress on multicore and an FPS tip (from PTS forum)

personman_145

I have no idea what of this pertains to Live vs PTS, hopefully he doesn't mind me posting it here. (I put some parts in bold)

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

PTS 1 doesn't have all of the performance improvements, there are a number of additional changes that are rolling out in upcoming PTS iterations. Quad-core machines (without hyperthreading) in particular should see a bump in the next PTS update. We're also tracking down and smoothing out hitching issues, specifically ones people encounter when running through cities and the FPS tanks abruptly for a few frames.

To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.

Given that ESO originally had to support very old CPUs, it's no secret that it was written from the ground-up as an effectively single-threaded application. As time went on and the min-spec was updated, and with the launch of Tamriel Unlimited/XB1/PS4, it necessitated the ability to use multiple cores in order for the game to run well (as it should). The work started then and continues through the present.

It's been an ongoing process to shift work over to other cores (and to the GPU) where we can in order to make the game perform better, and the work involved in doing so is fairly complex. It's not something we can point to and say "make all cores do the same amount of work" (though that is the goal!), it's typically "this certain part of the update takes a long time, let's find a way to shift that work over to other cores." Doing that is almost always a bit of a challenge because we have to make sure the cores that do that work don't conflict with things other cores are doing, which can cause corruption, crashes, hangs, etc. We also have to ensure that the changes are positive across all the platforms as well, from the wide range of supported CPUs on Windows + Mac, to XB1 and PS4, so these changes have to come out incrementally to ensure we make the experience better across the board.

We have a lot more work to do here, and we will continue to make improvements. There's always something that can be made better.

PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.

deano469

Good info. Thank you for posting!

Looking forward to the new improvements.

personman_145

With the multicore improvements in the latest PTS (since he posted this) and turning reflections down, the game seems quite a bit smoother. I know I'm cpu limited.

i5-3570k & GTX 1060.

DanteYoda

How will this affect old PCs i'm betting a massive chunk of customers are still running old tech.. So will this update help lose a huge majority?

Anacario

DanteYoda wrote: »

How will this affect old PCs i'm betting a massive chunk of customers are still running old tech.. So will this update help lose a huge majority?

Old computers with less cores won't benefit a whole lot from this change, but won't lose anything either. Multi-core support is a straight upgrade for people with four to eight cores to get the performance they should be getting.

Darkmage1337

I have an i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 3701 Mhz, (8 CPUs) and an nVidia GTX 770 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM.
I had this Desktop made over 4 years ago during ESO's beta, a few days before ESO launched in April 2014.

I'm not sure if I'm due for any upgrades. But probably so for the graphics card, but the GPU market is in a price-hike bubble due to the crypto-mines, unfortunately.

Gilvoth

thank you for this

RexyCat

Darkmage1337 wrote: »

I have an i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 3701 Mhz, (8 CPUs) and an nVidia GTX 770 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM.
I had this Desktop made over 4 years ago during ESO's beta, a few days before ESO launched in April 2014.

I'm not sure if I'm due for any upgrades. But probably so for the graphics card, but the GPU market is in a price-hike bubble due to the crypto-mines, unfortunately.

You should be able to find a reasonable price gtx 970 with 4 GB vRAM. The main problem here isn't only crypto mining, it is related to production of both system RAM (DDR4) and video RAM (GDDR5x).

Maybe check that your power supply unit isn't getting too old (PSU degrade over time and loose efficiency). Your CPU can be over clocked, if you have good air flow and cooling in your system. If you can get your clock speed up to 4-5 GHz (you might need to disable hyperthreading in BIOS) you might get a little more clock speed.

Search on internet to learn about over clocking both how to do it and what is its pro and cons (stability issues).

SkillzMFG

Anyone has any idea what FPS increase should I expect with AMD FX-8350? The game works very bad for me to the point that I can't go to Trials because the FPS falls down to like 10...

Here's the GPU and RAM I currently run:
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
RAM: 8 GB HyperX Black Edition

Skwor

Darkmage1337 wrote: »

I have an i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 3701 Mhz, (8 CPUs) and an nVidia GTX 770 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM.
I had this Desktop made over 4 years ago during ESO's beta, a few days before ESO launched in April 2014.

I'm not sure if I'm due for any upgrades. But probably so for the graphics card, but the GPU market is in a price-hike bubble due to the crypto-mines, unfortunately.

You chip is 4 cores 8 threads, which is a big difference from 8 cpus, more accurate to say you have 4 cpus (you have a quad core), for example an I7-6900k is 8 cores and 16 threads which would be more like 8 cpus.

AzraelKrieg

DanteYoda wrote: »

How will this affect old PCs i'm betting a massive chunk of customers are still running old tech.. So will this update help lose a huge majority?

They've already done a lot of phasing it out of old hardware with the game. First they removed DirectX9 support, then they dropped 32-bit support. Honestly, your machine isn't supporting DirectX11, 64-bit OS and a multicore CPU you may as well chuck the machine because it will become harder and harder for you to keep gaming on it.

Darkmage1337

RexyCat wrote: »

Darkmage1337 wrote: »

I have an i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 3701 Mhz, (8 CPUs) and an nVidia GTX 770 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM.
I had this Desktop made over 4 years ago during ESO's beta, a few days before ESO launched in April 2014.

I'm not sure if I'm due for any upgrades. But probably so for the graphics card, but the GPU market is in a price-hike bubble due to the crypto-mines, unfortunately.

You should be able to find a reasonable price gtx 970 with 4 GB vRAM. The main problem here isn't only crypto mining, it is related to production of both system RAM (DDR4) and video RAM (GDDR5x).

Maybe check that your power supply unit isn't getting too old (PSU degrade over time and loose efficiency). Your CPU can be over clocked, if you have good air flow and cooling in your system. If you can get your clock speed up to 4-5 GHz (you might need to disable hyperthreading in BIOS) you might get a little more clock speed.

Search on internet to learn about over clocking both how to do it and what is its pro and cons (stability issues).

I just recently replaced my PSU (went from a Corsair CS650M 80 Gold [from when I bought it 4 years ago] to a Corsair TX850M 80 Gold [bought a few months ago]), the former PSU died on me during Hurricane Irma. In January I got a 1 TB SSD (in addition to my 120 GB SSD that holds the operating system and a 2 TB HDD for non-gaming stuff, which I already had) and in January I got a new case (Phanteks p400) with more fans/better airflow than my old case, along with a new air cooling system.

As for over-clocking, I never looked into it much because I previously had an over-heating problem (PSU died due to an air cooling pump failure (which I was told like rarely ever happens) and the case just had bad airflow, overall. Plus, it didn't help living in Florida with no air conditioning (due to Hurricane Irma, at the time). But yeah, I'd love to upgrade my GPU, I think it's my weakest-link, atm. Lol.

Darkmage1337

Skwor wrote: »

Darkmage1337 wrote: »

I have an i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 3701 Mhz, (8 CPUs) and an nVidia GTX 770 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM.
I had this Desktop made over 4 years ago during ESO's beta, a few days before ESO launched in April 2014.

I'm not sure if I'm due for any upgrades. But probably so for the graphics card, but the GPU market is in a price-hike bubble due to the crypto-mines, unfortunately.

You chip is 4 cores 8 threads, which is a big difference from 8 cpus, more accurate to say you have 4 cpus (you have a quad core), for example an I7-6900k is 8 cores and 16 threads which would be more like 8 cpus.

Yeah, you're right, thanks. I had just copy/pasted what was on the DxDiag command since I forgot the exact specific specs, lol.

personman_145

w00t! Rebuilt my PC:

Old PC:
i5 3570k, 8GB RAM

New PC:
i5 8600k, 16GB RAM, also set it up with a Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO heatsink and fan. Thing is gigantic!

This game runs like a dream now. Places where I was dipping into 20fps I'm now dipping in to 50fps.

Waiting for update 18 to go Live for the enhanced multicore support.