FPS Problem

rluke

If it takes too long to make a new client, give us back the old one.

OpenGL works in Mojave, it is the latest OS that support OpenGL.

Zeni has 11 Months before the next macOS will released with no OpenGL Support.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

boggo wrote: »

GOT A SOLUTION:
1) Go to your Elder Scrolls Online folder
2) Rename the "live" subfolder to "live_old" to make a backup
3) Start game
---
You will lose your settings like that. Copy the files you need back into the newly generated "live" folder from your "live_old" folder. Be careful, this might lead back to slow FPS because one of those files seems to be the culprit.

I have tried this. I suppose this in the end in your case was about letting game to decide what are an optimal settings for you. Sadly in my case game recreated both caches and decided thet i should not go for medium settings and instead everything should be on high. Works for me really but still FPS is somewhere between 10 and 20 in Daggerfall city.

Jeth

rluke wrote: »

If it takes too long to make a new client, give us back the old one.

OpenGL works in Mojave, it is the latest OS that support OpenGL.

Zeni has 11 Months before the next macOS will released with no OpenGL Support.

^^ this

alterfenixeb17_ESO

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

boggo wrote: »

GOT A SOLUTION:
1) Go to your Elder Scrolls Online folder
2) Rename the "live" subfolder to "live_old" to make a backup
3) Start game
---
You will lose your settings like that. Copy the files you need back into the newly generated "live" folder from your "live_old" folder. Be careful, this might lead back to slow FPS because one of those files seems to be the culprit.

I have tried this. I suppose this in the end in your case was about letting game to decide what are an optimal settings for you. Sadly in my case game recreated both caches and decided thet i should not go for medium settings and instead everything should be on high. Works for me really but still FPS is somewhere between 10 and 20 in Daggerfall city.

Ok, after 1 hour playing on high settings + water reflections and ambient occlusion off it still is showing FPS somewhere between 15 and 25 but rather closer to 25 tbh (haven't tried Murkmire and Summerset yet, only base game) which for iMac model year 2013 could be better but then it is definitely playable. No slideshow so far really.

karpok

Yes I can reach 20-30 fps in open land and do some questing or crafting.

But try a trial or high-level dungeon and it's completely different. Fps drops to average 10-20 and even below making this unplayable.
That mean that we're missing most of the current event loots. This is clearly not serious nor professional.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Well did not try trial or instanced dungeon yet but done some public and dolmens, and there was so far little change really

qbit

sean.plackerb14_ESO wrote: »

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.

Thanks for the insight.

JJBoomer

having a lot of FPS issues here too. Was able to run at Ultra high with no issues until Murkmire.

macOS Mojave 10.14

iMac (Retina 5k, 27 inch, 2017)
4.2 GHz Intel Core i7
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro 580 8192 MB

Montie

I keep checking this for some kind of an update or solution. Cities are headache inducing. I managed to do a dolmen several times last night while I tried to get my addons set back up (I had renamed the live folder to try that and decided it was a good time to clean up my addons) but it was not fun nor smooth by any definition. It will allow me to get the event tickets though. I wish I could do more of the event...and go see the new content but that is not going to happen until the issue is fixed.

I can not understand why they would put a big content patch out mid event, but oh well. Here is hoping they can fix it or roll back the change easily until they can fix it. But I doubt it is that easy, things rarely are.

Evilspock

timdew wrote: »

It seems that Mac support isn't high on ZOS agenda, perhaps not enough of us?

Very disappointing.

If apple took gaming seriously then developers would to. Thier hardware is a joke, they put laptop gpus in supposed desktops like imacs, and throttle them down, for the form factor over performance. So this drives all serious gamers to PC. I just can’t stand using windows anymore.

Veladros

For a moment i thought i was the only one experiencing this.

I run TESo on my: iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Mid 2015)
Specs:
Processor: 3,3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 24 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphic: AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 MB

Battlegrounds, Cyrodiil, Imperial City and Trials are just unplayable. My average FPS before Murkmire was 60 - 50 (50 - 40 in heavy pvp situations). Now my average fps is 30 - 15 even after reducing graphic settings. I hope this gets sorted soon.

JJBoomer

Mac version unplayable in it's current state. @ESO_GinaBruno.

I'll be unsubbing until this is fixed.

JKith

The real problem isn't the overall super low FPS (which of course needs to be fixed),.. but when there are many things going on, it "skips" and freezes for just a fraction of a second (maybe this is just results of super low FPS?) But when it skips even for just a fraction of a second, makes content unplayable....

I even have all my graphics turned off and down to low (previously I was on High getting 50FPS). And still getting the issue, so it seems like a lower level problem going on...

mistermacintosh

Just glad I'm not the only one experiencing the fps loss. Was about to lose my mind. I guess this explains why customer support hasn't come back with anything yet regarding my ticket...

Also, in case anyone was thinking this was a Mojave issue, I didn't update to Mojave until after the nerfmire patch and frames were just as poor on High Sierra (late 2016 MacBook pro).

JJBoomer

mistermacintosh wrote: »

Just glad I'm not the only one experiencing the fps loss. Was about to lose my mind. I guess this explains why customer support hasn't come back with anything yet regarding my ticket...

Also, in case anyone was thinking this was a Mojave issue, I didn't update to Mojave until after the nerfmire patch and frames were just as poor on High Sierra (late 2016 MacBook pro).

it seems to be a Metal issue. Which if its the case, is up to Apple to fix, and there will be nothing ZOS can do about it. So hopefully that's not the case, but that was the only major change for the Mac version was the switch to Metal from OpenGL.

so we may be *** out of luck.

JKith

I remember watching "The making of Oblivion" and there was a guy who would play EVERYTHING in game, in several different ways to check for weird things and bugs...

I wonder if ZOS has someone or a team like that? Who actually plays the game for hours and hours and hours attacking it from several different angles to see if there are any bugs. Would seem like a fun and needed job!!

qbit

JKith wrote: »

I remember watching "The making of Oblivion" and there was a guy who would play EVERYTHING in game, in several different ways to check for weird things and bugs...

I wonder if ZOS has someone or a team like that? Who actually plays the game for hours and hours and hours attacking it from several different angles to see if there are any bugs. Would seem like a fun and needed job!!

That would be QA and it’s often outsourced to people that don’t care or the uninformed children of the developers. Or ignored completely. I find it unlikely ZOS invests in proper QA testing team

alterfenixeb17_ESO

JKith wrote: »

I remember watching "The making of Oblivion" and there was a guy who would play EVERYTHING in game, in several different ways to check for weird things and bugs...

I wonder if ZOS has someone or a team like that? Who actually plays the game for hours and hours and hours attacking it from several different angles to see if there are any bugs. Would seem like a fun and needed job!!

I remember that however it was more about testing the actual content rather than technology. And to be honest when Oblivion came out I remember that on my old GF FX5700 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT (both one of the fastest GPUs when Oblivion came out) were struggling for performance due to bugs. Content wise Oblivion was a lot of fun but really performance was just bad back then when it got released.

Evilspock

JJBoomer wrote: »

it seems to be a Metal issue. Which if its the case, is up to Apple to fix, and there will be nothing ZOS can do about it. So hopefully that's not the case, but that was the only major change for the Mac version was the switch to Metal from OpenGL.

so we may be *** out of luck.

There’s no reason ZOS can’t still use opengl like before. They could even do it past macos supporting it, just state game won’t be compatible with that version of macos. This is much preferable than jumping the gun and having an unplayable game due to performance.

smacx250

Other benchmarks have shown Metal to be as fast as or faster than OpenGL, so this isn't a Metal issue. May be a MoltenVK issue (translation layer ZOS is using to go from Vulkan to Metal), a Vulkan issue (the graphics API that ESO has replaced OpenGL with), or ESO code itself.

smacx250

Just as a point of reference, here is the performance difference of Dota 2 in going from OpenGL to Vulkan (using MoltenVK) on macOS:



From:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-macos-ios-but-no-thanks-to-apple/

rluke

smacx250 wrote: »

Just as a point of reference, here is the performance difference of Dota 2 in going from OpenGL to Vulkan (using MoltenVK) on macOS:



From:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-macos-ios-but-no-thanks-to-apple/

Nice and we got -75 % FPS

JJBoomer

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.

lol so you're saying that no matter what, mac players are going to experience a performance loss with the switch as opposed to our performance using OpenGL. that's terrible. new tech should not make things worse.

Morgha_Kul

I'm suspecting a memory leak of some kind... I've been playing for a few hours now at around 50-60fps. On returning to Evermore, my fps dropped to 15, and nothing could recover it. I even dropped to minimum settings and STILL only got around 31fps.

Now, I'm not running a cutting edge system, but until now it's been sufficient to get 50-60fps on maximum settings.

64 bit Windows 7
10GB RAM
Intel i5 @ 2.67gHz
GeForce GTX 1050Ti

kenjitamura

JJBoomer wrote: »

lol so you're saying that no matter what, mac players are going to experience a performance loss with the switch as opposed to our performance using OpenGL. that's terrible. new tech should not make things worse.

Actually if done right the MoltenVK port should give a decent boost in performance over OpenGL. Apple hadn't updated their OpenGL driver in years which made it unoptimized and it was also all the way back at OpenGL 4.1 I believe; for comparison the current OpenGL spec is 4.6.

It's also a little bit harder to optimize a game in OpenGL to reach the same low overhead that a native Vulkan/Metal implementation will just have.

Current ESO MoltenVK performance problems are probably the result of a bug or due to it being in an incomplete state. It would be much more optimal if developers could natively target Vulkan on Mac but Apple refuses to let that happen. Apple is such a massive company that to dedicate a few developers to a Vulkan driver would be completely inconsequential for them.

rluke

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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

Any Update ?

Puodas

I’m having same issue with low FPS (20). Before I had 50-60 on my MBR late 2017 with 4gb vram video card

dustgollum

rluke wrote: »

If it takes too long to make a new client, give us back the old one.

OpenGL works in Mojave, it is the latest OS that support OpenGL.

Zeni has 11 Months before the next macOS will released with no OpenGL Support.

^^ THIS.
It's pretty obvious there was no testing done. I can barely get my event tickets and there's no use trying anything else but farming at an FPS of 4-29. Game is unplayable. Please roll back the mac client if possible and re-do this properly at a later date...preferably after all the holiday events!

mistermacintosh

JJBoomer wrote: »

mistermacintosh wrote: »

Just glad I'm not the only one experiencing the fps loss. Was about to lose my mind. I guess this explains why customer support hasn't come back with anything yet regarding my ticket...

Also, in case anyone was thinking this was a Mojave issue, I didn't update to Mojave until after the nerfmire patch and frames were just as poor on High Sierra (late 2016 MacBook pro).

it seems to be a Metal issue. Which if its the case, is up to Apple to fix, and there will be nothing ZOS can do about it. So hopefully that's not the case, but that was the only major change for the Mac version was the switch to Metal from OpenGL.

so we may be *** out of luck.

Hope not. I can't do 5 fps. I've put up with a lot of sketchy stuff to play this game, and I'm used to being treated like a second class citizen for using a mac, but poor frame rate affects everything. Forget about group content. Even player housing is affected. Player housing. That system I've already sunk hundreds of dollars into is barely enjoyable right now.

And this is all during a holiday event, with 3 more on the way. We need a solution asap if they expect us to be here for any of it.

rluke

It's really frustrating since Monday the game has become unplayable.
And there is no ETA how long it takes to solve the problem.