Did an update hurt performance?

hobohunter104

I had crappy Dell laptop that was just under the minimum requirements that ran the game in the 20-30 fps range (outside of 50+ player pvp fights) on medium/low settings on 1366x768, at high subsampling. When it broke right after Morrowind released, I went close to a year before I replaced it with a real gaming PC that runs the game great.

This past week, I fixed the laptop up and give it to my younger brother, and we planned on playing together, but now the performance on the laptop is horrible, it gets 5-20 fps and unplayable input lag on the lowest possible settings with even more of the graphical effects turned off in the UserSettings file, the only "fix" is to lower the resolution down to where the text is no longer readable and turn subsampling to low, which brings the fps up to where is used to be, but it's impossible to see and not playable. The settings the laptop used to run ok now get fps in the single digits, and nonresponsive input.

Was there an update between July 2017 and now that was known to have tanked the performance, especially on low-end systems? The fact that my old PC saw such a massive hit to performance over the past year and a half makes me wonder how much lower the performance my current gaming PC is than what it would haven gotten before ZOS did whatever the did. I'm well aware of the game's poor optimization for multi-core CPU's and its sometimes laggy shaders, so did those get worse, or is there some new issue?

Starlight_Knight

Somewhere around that time they went to 64bit only i believe.. cant think of much else they did apart from add loads of content so it's going to take up more room on the laptop now than it did.

hobohunter104

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Somewhere around that time they went to 64bit only i believe.. cant think of much else they did apart from add loads of content so it's going to take up more room on the laptop now than it did.

That could be it. The Laptop is 64bit but I might have run it as a 32bit application back then. If that's the case, then it's totally fine, 32bit is being phased out across the industry so it makes perfect sense.

I wouldn't think that 32bit vs 64bit alone would make that big of a performance impact, so maybe since the 64bit version was the "high end" version it was never optimized for lower-end systems like the 32bit version was. If that's the case, since my laptop was only just below the minimum requirements (the GPU is a higher-end integrated card and the i3 is only a little slower than the minumum) and got hit that hard, I would imagine that a system right at the minimum requirements wouldn't be performing as well as it used to either, and if that's the case, then they should either increase the minimum requirements or optimize the 64bit engine for them. That's all just a guess, I'm not trying to criticize ZOS or accuse them of anything, the optimization for both versions might have been the exact same and the upgrade to a 64bit process alone might have been all it took to tank my laptop's performance. I just can't help but wonder.

hobohunter104

The patch that just came out did give the laptop a 5fps boost and make the game almost playable on 720p medium subsampling low settings, but it still has a ways to go before the performance is back up to where it used to be. Hopefully performance keeps getting a little better every patch, another three or four 5fps boosts like this one and it'll play at high subsampling again. Whatever ZOS did, keep doing it.