FPS Problem

rluke

Getting around 15-25 FPS
Before Patch 80-100 FPS

Mac Pro
GTX 1080ti
24gb RAM

Monitor Dell Alienware 34inch 3418 (3440x1440) 100hz

Juju_beans

Same is happening to me.

FPS before patch: 60fps
FPS after patch : 20fps

No addons.

iMac late 2013
High Sierra 10.13.6

rluke

Many ppl in Discord and German Forum reported the same Problem.

Rowjoh

same here

nathan_bri

Same. Frame rates before patch were quite good. Now I am getting 20 fps in Alinor at the same settings as before. Running Mojave on an iMac Retina with 40GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

ZOS_GinaBruno

Thanks all, we're aware and working on making some improvements for an incremental patch.

barrrt

13 FPS sitting outside of stables in Davon's Watch. Before 30-40. :-(

Even setting video to low, it's around 25fps... in practically empty static area.

The switch to Metal should have been done over 2-3 patches to give devs time to optimize... this drop of frame rates by 70% is just... I have no words. :-(

rluke

its not playable atm

Gralor

Horrible... Unless you like slideshows.

qbit

They changed the renderer (from patch notes):

We have switched the Mac renderer from OpenGL to MoltenVK (Metal) to support the upcoming release of the upcoming MacOS Mojave.

So either Metal is garbage, the ZOS devs used it poorly, or the current MacOS implementation of it is garbage.

This doesn't bode well for another game (simulator actually) I greatly enjoy that has been working on converting from OpenGL to Vulkan for a while now. I'm not aware of the differences and similarities between Vulkan and Metal and how they are implemented. Perhaps Metal is just really awful. Too early to say, and this isn't the forum to find that out on.

I'm sorry to say, but this would be a good time to get a PC. You can install Windows to a Mac with some messing around with it. Well, at least a co-worker of mine did so years ago. May not be possible anymore. I went the other way around and got MacOS installed to an old Dell Optiplex. Good times.

Personally, I'd like to see them ditch cross-platform APIs and upgrade the renderer to DX12. That would probably solve a lot of performance problems related to poor multi-threading for the vast majority of their player base.

kenjitamura

qbit wrote: »

They changed the renderer (from patch notes):

We have switched the Mac renderer from OpenGL to MoltenVK (Metal) to support the upcoming release of the upcoming MacOS Mojave.

So either Metal is garbage, the ZOS devs used it poorly, or the current MacOS implementation of it is garbage.

MoltenVK is a translation layer. Graphics API's have commands that are meant for the operating systems drivers to receive and interpret then compiled into machine code sent directly to the hardware. Because Apple doesn't support Vulkan those commands meant for Vulkan are going through an extra step to be turned into the command equivalent for Metal so that MacOS can interface with the Vulkan language. It requires the system to work a little harder and reduces FPS a little more than if they had just used a pure Metal implementation. But if done right the impact should really only be about a 10% reduction in FPS over using pure Metal. There's most likely a bug in their code which could either be present in their Vulkan code or in the MoltenVK implementation which means they might have to reach out to Khronos to help fix it.

qbit wrote: »

Personally, I'd like to see them ditch cross-platform APIs and upgrade the renderer to DX12. That would probably solve a lot of performance problems related to poor multi-threading for the vast majority of their player base.

Bethesda has partnered with AMD and are making a push to convert most of their games to Vulkan which is probably why ZOS has chosen to use Vulkan instead of having to hire two sets of developers with one trained for Metal and the other trained for DX12.

Vulkan is as good as DX12 when it comes to performance and multi-threading as they are both very low level languages with equivalent feature sets. With that being the case the only real questions the developer needs to ask when deciding between the two are

1. Will it be easier to obtain/reuse developers trained to port to Vulkan or DX12?

2. If the developers are supporting different platforms how much of the code can be reused to save time/money when using DX12 or Vulkan?

As ZOS works with Bethesda they should have a decent ability to draw from their pre-existing Vulkan porting developer pool and since Vulkan can be used on MacOS, albeit with some hacking, it means there is a much greater amount of code that can be shared between the two different platforms rendering paths.

Corew

Well, things worked just fine as it was under Mojave.. now it's unplayable. Sigh, guess it's just another game I have to play in Windows ;P

karpok

Not really a surprise. It was already unplayable on the pts since day 1. But not because of fps issues.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Ok a few things from me:

1. After a few hours of gameplay it seems that memory usage with all addons enabled is still around 3 - 3,5 GB. With patch 4.1.5 record in my case was 20 GB so that's a heavy improvement.
2. There is a mouse issue. Every now and then when I press M for map and then leave i by pressing M again mouse pointer does not disappear making it a lot harder to navigate.
3. FPS issue. On medium settings and most graphic options set to ON before patch I was getting around 40 - 50 fps with my GTX 775M however now it often is less than 10 even. I would expect some performance drop but not really that significant.
4. Font scaling issue. Sometimes when I exit full screen and then reenter it by using Alt+Enter it happens that all fonts go awkward by i being too small or sometimes even having effect of what appears to be each letter printed with font of a different size.

It is still playable however the overall experience (except to related to memory usage) before patch was better.

kamimark

When I go to windowed mode, it chose a very small size, rather than the old max-minus-Dock size I had. Resizing it works fine, apparently. Haven't had a chance to relaunch it and see if it remembers this new setting, but I often have to tab out, so this needs to be consistent.

Mouse pointer wasn't being captured/hidden when I returned to a windowed mode, but doing something in UI and then Esc back to the targeting reticle hid the pointer again.

FPS dropped from 50+ to 15 at best. Dropping graphics & texture quality made little difference, and looked awful, so I put that back to High. Dropping view distance to 50m made an enormous difference, got it up to 20-30 which was at least playable.

Specs:
Mojave 10.14 (18A391)
iMac 5K 27", mid-2015
3.3GHz i5
16 GB RAM
AMD R9 M290 2048MB

ethernut60

My fps also shows considerably lower than before. Tinkering around with performance improvement settings makes no difference. HOWEVER, graphics look better and overall performance is much smoother and more responsive.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Nvidia GeForce GT 750M, 2 GB vRAM

macOS Mojave 10.14 (18A391)

Montie

Just throwing my hat in this as well. Performance was fine pre patch and now...not so much.

Running Mojave
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac18,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 4.2 GHz
Memory: 24 GB

qbit

kenjitamura wrote: »

qbit wrote: »

They changed the renderer (from patch notes):

We have switched the Mac renderer from OpenGL to MoltenVK (Metal) to support the upcoming release of the upcoming MacOS Mojave.

So either Metal is garbage, the ZOS devs used it poorly, or the current MacOS implementation of it is garbage.

MoltenVK is a translation layer. Graphics API's have commands that are meant for the operating systems drivers to receive and interpret then compiled into machine code sent directly to the hardware. Because Apple doesn't support Vulkan those commands meant for Vulkan are going through an extra step to be turned into the command equivalent for Metal so that MacOS can interface with the Vulkan language. It requires the system to work a little harder and reduces FPS a little more than if they had just used a pure Metal implementation. But if done right the impact should really only be about a 10% reduction in FPS over using pure Metal. There's most likely a bug in their code which could either be present in their Vulkan code or in the MoltenVK implementation which means they might have to reach out to Khronos to help fix it.

qbit wrote: »

Personally, I'd like to see them ditch cross-platform APIs and upgrade the renderer to DX12. That would probably solve a lot of performance problems related to poor multi-threading for the vast majority of their player base.

Bethesda has partnered with AMD and are making a push to convert most of their games to Vulkan which is probably why ZOS has chosen to use Vulkan instead of having to hire two sets of developers with one trained for Metal and the other trained for DX12.

Vulkan is as good as DX12 when it comes to performance and multi-threading as they are both very low level languages with equivalent feature sets. With that being the case the only real questions the developer needs to ask when deciding between the two are

1. Will it be easier to obtain/reuse developers trained to port to Vulkan or DX12?

2. If the developers are supporting different platforms how much of the code can be reused to save time/money when using DX12 or Vulkan?

As ZOS works with Bethesda they should have a decent ability to draw from their pre-existing Vulkan porting developer pool and since Vulkan can be used on MacOS, albeit with some hacking, it means there is a much greater amount of code that can be shared between the two different platforms rendering paths.

Thanks for that. So the take away for me is they botched the Metal rollout. .... I mean, regardless of the underlying tech and cause for issues, they rolled this update out knowing Mac users would get a 10 to 20 FPS drop. On an already low FPS game. Unforgivable. Sorry, ZOS

qbit

Another thread referenced upgrading to Mojave. I don’t know if that’s possible since I’m a Windows got, but it might fix your issue.

rluke

I hope they fix it soon,
with 20fps its not playable in PVP or Trails.

barrrt

OK, had to play with settings, so the game looks a bit worse than yesterday and it does stutter occasionally, but I am getting 35-40 fps, and just run a delve with bunch of other people with no problem. I am playing on 2013 27" iMac with 4GB GTX 780M. One thing I noticed that fps appeared to get better with time... after 10 or so minutes... not sure if just my imagination though.

My settings:

- windowed mode (i.e. entire screen except for menu bar and dock)
- vertical sync: off
- anti aliasing: on
- texture q: high
- subsampling: high
- shadow: low
- water reflections: off
- max particle systems: 768
- particle supp. dist.: 35
- view distance 37
- ambient occlusion: None

All other switches ON, except for ally effects.

If you are having issues, may be worth starting with these, giving it 10-15 minutes, then adjusting if necessary.

PS. I even turned all 50 or so addons I usually run back on, no issue.

SirAndy

Well, to be fair, when they said this was going to be a "performance improvement patch" they didn't actually specify who's performance they improved.

My guess is probably the performance of the phone support for the crown store ...

Punnyguy

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks all, we're aware and working on making some improvements for an incremental patch.

Any ETA on the incremental patch to fix this? The game is all but unplayable.

HowTaoBrownCow

Just adding my report of the same FPS problem, on a maxed-out 2017 Macbook Pro. Had decent FPS on high settings before the patch, now getting 10-17 FPS in areas like the Vivec City market, and only a few points better in player homes and delves. I can play it, but I have to squint in the big cities or I get nauseous.

I hope that incremental patch comes soon.

seaef

Adding my FPS issues as well. Please fix ASAP. Unplayable and I'm on an iMac Pro with 128G RAM and 16G VRAM. WTF?!?

Jeth

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks all, we're aware and working on making some improvements for an incremental patch.

Seriously, this is complete BS. If I wanted to watch grandpa's vacation slides from trips to aztec ruins, I'd log off and give him a call. I have been playing this game that is near beta quality since, ummmm, beta. How do you release an update the cuts graphics performance by 75%?

The fact is you were aware of this before it went live because it was reported. So happy you're spending all the real coin you're sent on developing furniture and other pretty pixels. In the mean time, a significant portion of your paying customers can't run a 4-man.

This *** better be fixed soon.

Juju_beans

@barrrt I tried the settings you posted. Didn't really make much of a difference and I played for 20-30 minutes.

In my home (snugpod)...95 FPS
In Eldenroot...19-20 FPS
In a delve ..25 FPS
At a crowded dolmen (VG)..10 FPS

Jeth

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks all, we're aware and working on making some improvements for an incremental patch.

Give us a date when this will get fixed and what "some improvements" means. 10 FPS improved to 11 FPS? Canceling sub until we get some answers.

barrrt

@Juju_beans That's a shame. :-(

My delves were fine, but yeah, coming back to town was a pain... around 20fps with lots of stutters into low teens. This was in general true of complex environments - areas outside of Windhelm, which are fairly open and clear, were where I was getting these higher fps rates, but more complex open world, such as Shdowfen, was much lower. Pre-patch there would be differences, of course, but nowhere near this magnitude.

I meant to get to one of the Alik'r dolmen; I guess I am glad I didn't. Honestly at this point, if it wasn't for the fact I am trying to level up two toons with double XP, I'd probably have to stop playing until this is fixed. Too frustrating.

sean.plackerb14_ESO

I don't have a Mac but I'm sorry you guys are having to deal with this. That stinks. I came to the forums because I was curious after reading the patch notes if you guys noticed a perf increase.

I do find it quite interesting they went with using Vulkan combined with MoltenVK which translates Vulkan to Metal API calls (and is open source and free under the Apache License) instead of just using Metal alone. Makes me think/wonder if we are gonna get a Vulkan renderer on the Windows client anytime soon. That's the only reason I can see for them using MoltenVK. Lets them have one Vulkan renderer for PC and Mac with the MoltenVK wrapper on Mac translating to Metal API calls. Instead of one DX 11 one DX 12 renderer on Windows and a Metal renderer for Mac.

For those wondering if Metal is just a bad API or MoltenVK is at fault its not. Metal is used in a handful of mac ports of AAA games (Deus EX Mankind Divided, Rise of the tomb raider, Fortnite, World of Warcraft etc) and have no performance issues. As for MoltenVK Valve uses it for Dota 2 on Mac and saw a significant increase in performance compared to OpenGL. This issue with ESO is just a nasty bug that needs to be fixed.

raffaeleg

I've noticed also on the PTS server... I couldn't guess this was happening on the final version. I'm wondering if the Mac support is alive on this game. Just running the game after hours of waiting, busy servers.. and now? Pressing ESC in game and I can't click anything!