What specs do you need to run the game on full settings with smooth FPS?

Nyladreas

Pretty much title. I'm looking for specs that would be able to run the game on the highest possible quality without having to "waste" money on stuff that isn't needed. Not a budget computer, but not a NASA computer either.

I want a laptop too as I travel around the world for work a lot, so please no desktop suggestions or arguments even if it's with positive intent.

ESO is the only game I'm interested in, possibly TES:VI in the future. Don't need specs that will grant me performance for years ahead, just something that will make this game beautiful and enjoyable.

Anyone who can answer this, please?

Ectheliontnacil

Well I'm no expert, but from what I heard MMOs are quite cpu intensive and ofc you should have a decent graphics card.

To give you an idea: I was able to play dungeons quite well on my surface book 2 (gtx 1060), which isn't a gaming laptop at all. More of a college laptop xD.
But if I had tried to pvp I would have fried it in like 10 mins xD.

Edit: 4k gaming laptop should be fantastic , maybe even slightly overkill. My point is more that eso has bad performance in general, it's not an issue of your hardware but of the game itself.
If you're in the middle of the zergball you won't have that perfect fluidity BUT it won't matter because the lag will make playing impossible anyways.

Bottom line, anything even in the 2-3k range will be just fine. But depending on what you do in game, you might run into some tight spots performance wise.

Ectheliontnacil

Depends on the content you do and what you call smooth. If you want that 100+ fps while zerging at prime time with maxed settings, you'd have to go VERY high end. I'd say a laptop probably won't meet your requirements in that case anyways.

If you're into pve overland content/dungeons and then any halfway decent gaming laptop should be fine.

Problem with eso is that different situations have vastly different hardware requirements. It's not uncommon for your fps to drop by 70 or so when that 80 man zerg comes crushing down on you.
But solo questing isn't very demanding on your pc.

Nyladreas

Ectheliontnacil wrote: »

Depends on the content you do and what you call smooth. If you want that 100+ fps while zerging at prime time with maxed settings, you'd have to go VERY high end. I'd say a laptop probably won't meet your requirements in that case anyways.

If you're into pve overland content/dungeons and then any halfway decent gaming laptop should be fine.

Problem with eso is that different situations have vastly different hardware requirements. It's not uncommon for your fps to drop by 70 or so when that 80 man zerg comes crushing down on you.

Thank you. What part of the hardware do you think gets the most beating in performance-heavy situations? @Ectheliontnacil

I was looking at some of the MSI laptops that go up to $4000 in price. You think even those would lag behind?

MLGProPlayer

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Nyladreas

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

Nyladreas

Ectheliontnacil wrote: »

Well I'm no expert, but from what I heard MMOs are quite cpu intensive and ofc you should have a decent graphics card.

To give you an idea: I was able to play dungeons quite well on my surface book 2 (gtx 1060), which isn't a gaming laptop at all. More of a college laptop xD.
But if I had tried to pvp I would have fried it in like 10 mins xD.

Edit: 4k gaming laptop should be fantastic , maybe even slightly overkill. My point is more that eso has bad performance in general, it's not an issue of your hardware but of the game itself.
If you're in the middle of the zergball you won't have that perfect fluidity BUT it won't matter because the lag will make playing impossible anyways.

Bottom line, anything even in the 2-3k range will be just fine. But depending on what you do in game, you might run into some tight spots performance wise.

Thanks a ton for the info

MLGProPlayer

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

They offloaded a little bit of the processing load to your other cores, but you won't notice a difference in performance. It was a very minor tweak.

dbgager

Basically that PC does not exist. The game is engine bound. Even with the best CPUs and GPUs you will get FPS below 60 in heavily populated areas. You can throw all the hardware you want at the games. But the game itself is not capable of performing when there is a lot going onscreen. I myself have an i7 8700K/ GTX 1080ti/ 32 GB/ SSD. And I often get FPS slowing down to as low as 50. on 1440P.

Skwor

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

Kadoin

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

The game's real bottlenecks seem to be anywhere lots of storage access is required, anywhere lots of models need loading (they don't persist in memory despite there being plenty of VRAM and RAM available and appear to sometimes infinitely load and reload?), and lots of floating point.

You will notice little, if any gain as long as that is true.

Also I have more than one PC with different configs and performance appears to barely change under stack conditions in PvP. It's almost as if its directly along the lines of the CPUs single core FP performance differences...Oh wait, it doesn't just appear that way, it actually is...

Kadoin

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Don't forget lowering shadows. That also can cut FPS down in some cases. Depending on CPU it can make a large difference at least between the 6 PCs in my home with different setups.

MLGProPlayer

Skwor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

70 FPS in a game from 2014 is awful, especially a game with texture quality as low as ESO.

I also average 70+ FPS in overworld (I have almost the exact same build as you). That has never been the problem with this game.

The problem is the game runs like horse *** in a ton of different content (trials, populated towns, PvP, etc.).

And "using" multiple cores doesn't mean using them efficiently. Run diagnostics while you play this game and you'll see. Neither your GPU nor CPU usage will exceed 40%. The optimization is horrifyingly bad.

If you think this is "good" performance, you haven't played many video games before.

MLGProPlayer

Kadoin wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

The game's real bottlenecks seem to be anywhere lots of storage access is required, anywhere lots of models need loading (they don't persist in memory despite there being plenty of VRAM and RAM available and appear to sometimes infinitely load and reload?), and lots of floating point.

You will notice little, if any gain as long as that is true.

Also I have more than one PC with different configs and performance appears to barely change under stack conditions in PvP. It's almost as if its directly along the lines of the CPUs single core FP performance differences...Oh wait, it doesn't just appear that way, it actually is...

I've tried this game on multiple different builds as well, from the low end to the high end of the spectrum. No difference in performance.

GPUs I've tested:

- GTX 1080
- GTX 970
- GTX 660

CPUs:

i5 6600K
R5 1600

The upper end of FPS will change. For example, I can hit 144+ FPS inside a housing instance with the GTX 1080 (whereas the 660 will be topped out at around 60 FPS and the 970 around 120 FPS). But in content where the FPS drops (populated towns, PvP, trials, etc.), they all drop to the same point of 30-40 FPS.

Spending money on a PC build just to improve your performance in ESO is a recipe for disaster. Only do this if you play other games too where the extra power is actually useful.

FlyingSwan

I travel a lot too, and whilst I have a beefy desktop at home, my laptop is a Dell XPS15 wuth Core i7 and GTX1050 and 4k screen. This spec plays ESO just fine at a sufficient FPS (have to check what later). I do not play in 4k however, as you can't really notice the difference on a 15" screen and it just drains the battery faster/makes the laptop very hot.

I mainly got the 4k screen as it is the only touch screen option on the Dell.

Best laptop I've ever owned from a business context and good enough for gaming on the move.

Bhaal5

There is no such machine to perform this witchcraft

RouDeR

i9 9900k with liquid nitrogen cooling Overclocked to 6,5 o 7 ghz can do the job you are asking for.

Gythral

A time machine to allow you to move forward a few decades and bring a PC from that era back, along with set of network nodes for your internet route, and a sevrer rack for ZOS...

Banana

RouDeR wrote: »

i9 9900k with liquid nitrogen cooling Overclocked to 6,5 o 7 ghz can do the job you are asking for.

That doesnt sound reliable

Nemesis7884

Tip 1 turn water reflections off
Tip 2 turn shadows down
Tip 3 reduce number of particles and view distance
Tip 4 turn depth of field off

There...just saved you 20 fps with nearly no impact on visual fidelity

Digiman

Sadly you will never get buttery smooth frame rate on a MMO, especially this one with high settings. The game just doesn't work efficiently for that...

Its a software issue, I have medium shadows and low reflections with particles turned all the way down, thats the best way to get decent framerate and oddly enough the game looks about the same.

Skwor

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Skwor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

70 FPS in a game from 2014 is awful, especially a game with texture quality as low as ESO.

I also average 70+ FPS in overworld (I have almost the exact same build as you). That has never been the problem with this game.

The problem is the game runs like horse *** in a ton of different content (trials, populated towns, PvP, etc.).

And "using" multiple cores doesn't mean using them efficiently. Run diagnostics while you play this game and you'll see. Neither your GPU nor CPU usage will exceed 40%. The optimization is horrifyingly bad.

If you think this is "good" performance, you haven't played many video games before.

After 60 fps you can not notice the difference, period. So for anyone buying a pc for games, which most will do with a budget, that is what is important.

Not everyone can afford bleeding edge technology and in this case even if you could it does not matter. It is called practical advice.

Let me help you here as an example, 8k tvs are soon to hit the commercial market. Do not buy one, as even at 4k the human eye is saturated with detail. Unless you plan on massively zooming in on the picture 8k is a total waste of resources, see how that works?

Oh BTW I have been playing and optimising video games since 1984. Started doing it in DOS. Do you even know what HIMEM is? Nice try though.

Nyladreas

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Kadoin wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

The game's real bottlenecks seem to be anywhere lots of storage access is required, anywhere lots of models need loading (they don't persist in memory despite there being plenty of VRAM and RAM available and appear to sometimes infinitely load and reload?), and lots of floating point.

You will notice little, if any gain as long as that is true.

Also I have more than one PC with different configs and performance appears to barely change under stack conditions in PvP. It's almost as if its directly along the lines of the CPUs single core FP performance differences...Oh wait, it doesn't just appear that way, it actually is...

Spending money on a PC build just to improve your performance in ESO is a recipe for disaster. Only do this if you play other games too where the extra power is actually useful.

This Exactly is why I'm asking. thank you.

Nyladreas

dbgager wrote: »

Basically that PC does not exist. The game is engine bound. Even with the best CPUs and GPUs you will get FPS below 60 in heavily populated areas. You can throw all the hardware you want at the games. But the game itself is not capable of performing when there is a lot going onscreen. I myself have an i7 8700K/ GTX 1080ti/ 32 GB/ SSD. And I often get FPS slowing down to as low as 50. on 1440P.

As low as 50 sounds perfect. I'd be happy with anything that would stay above 30 fps in the most performance-heavy situations.

There's like no reason to go higher really.

MLGProPlayer

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Tip 1 turn water reflections off
Tip 2 turn shadows down
Tip 3 reduce number of particles and view distance
Tip 4 turn depth of field off

There...just saved you 20 fps with nearly no impact on visual fidelity

It's a pretty damn noticeable impact on fidelity.

Water will look like plastic and textures will pop in like it's BDO.

MLGProPlayer

Skwor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Skwor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

70 FPS in a game from 2014 is awful, especially a game with texture quality as low as ESO.

I also average 70+ FPS in overworld (I have almost the exact same build as you). That has never been the problem with this game.

The problem is the game runs like horse *** in a ton of different content (trials, populated towns, PvP, etc.).

And "using" multiple cores doesn't mean using them efficiently. Run diagnostics while you play this game and you'll see. Neither your GPU nor CPU usage will exceed 40%. The optimization is horrifyingly bad.

If you think this is "good" performance, you haven't played many video games before.

After 60 fps you can not notice the difference, period. So for anyone buying a pc for games, which most will do with a budget, that is what is important.

Not everyone can afford bleeding edge technology and in this case even if you could it does not matter. It is called practical advice.

Let me help you here as an example, 8k tvs are soon to hit the commercial market. Do not buy one, as even at 4k the human eye is saturated with detail. Unless you plan on massively zooming in on the picture 8k is a total waste of resources, see how that works?

Oh BTW I have been playing and optimising video games since 1984. Started doing it in DOS. Do you even know what HIMEM is? Nice try though.

You can absolutely tell the difference above 60 fps if you have a high referesh rate monitor. I play on a 144 hz monitor and the difference between 60 fps and 100+ fps is like night and day. Upgrading to 144 hz was probably the single biggest gaming upgrade I ever made.

Skwor

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Skwor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Skwor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

70 FPS in a game from 2014 is awful, especially a game with texture quality as low as ESO.

I also average 70+ FPS in overworld (I have almost the exact same build as you). That has never been the problem with this game.

The problem is the game runs like horse *** in a ton of different content (trials, populated towns, PvP, etc.).

And "using" multiple cores doesn't mean using them efficiently. Run diagnostics while you play this game and you'll see. Neither your GPU nor CPU usage will exceed 40%. The optimization is horrifyingly bad.

If you think this is "good" performance, you haven't played many video games before.

After 60 fps you can not notice the difference, period. So for anyone buying a pc for games, which most will do with a budget, that is what is important.

Not everyone can afford bleeding edge technology and in this case even if you could it does not matter. It is called practical advice.

Let me help you here as an example, 8k tvs are soon to hit the commercial market. Do not buy one, as even at 4k the human eye is saturated with detail. Unless you plan on massively zooming in on the picture 8k is a total waste of resources, see how that works?

Oh BTW I have been playing and optimising video games since 1984. Started doing it in DOS. Do you even know what HIMEM is? Nice try though.

You can absolutely tell the difference above 60 fps if you have a high referesh rate monitor. I play on a 144 hz monitor and the difference between 60 fps and 100+ fps is like night and day. Upgrading to 144 hz was probably the single biggest gaming upgrade I ever made.

LoL then you must be just a few inches from your monitor.

Here is the physiology of the human eye in regards to frame rate. The upper limit can be as high as 150 some say 1000fps. An exceptionally sensitive person trying to see the difference may be able to notice something up to 150, above that they can can possibly register incredibley subtle differences but you brain just won't know the difference.

60 is where the shift typically occurs after which the subtleties are so minor as to be inconsequential. This is predicated upon beig at a visual distance where the screen is in your entire field of view, if you get real close then pixelation will allow you to perceive the subtlies more effectively.

As I said practical verses possible.

Sooo OK you possibly notice a difference but if you keep trying to say it matters I will be forced to laugh at you a second time. Now go away you smelly little Englishman.

xenowarrior92eb17_ESO

Dual-Core at 3Ghz clock...most importantly a monitor that cant exceed 800-600 resolution and a gtx780...that way u have solid 60 fps everywhere...in trials and cyrodill...otherwise u dont...if u want 60+ solid fps with 4k resolution monitor u need to get an i9 6 core at least and OC to 5+Ghz on the 1st 4 cores as a minimum with gpu still being gtx 780+ but ofc u can go 1080 ti or rtx 2080 or sli or quad sli...wont rly make the difference

Qbiken

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Skwor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Specs won't help you in this game. It's poorly optimized. You'll still be dropping to 30 FPS in crowded towns with an i7 9800K and RTX 2080TI. You'll never exceed 30-40% GPU/CPU usage since the engine is effectively only using a single CPU core and only a fraction of your GPU's processing power (since there is a CPU bottleneck).

The only thing that can improve FPS is reducing view distance and turning off reflections.

Are you sure? AFAIK multi-core support was brought in and confirmed sometime during summerset...

MLGPro has no clue what he is talking about. I have an octicore I7-6900 and all 16 threads are used by ESO. Also run a GTX 1080 game settings maxed. I typically run at 70 FPS and rarely go below 50 even in crowded cities and this is with me running close to 40 mods at the same time.

Only time things slow down is large pvp fights but that is much more on eso side.

70 FPS in a game from 2014 is awful, especially a game with texture quality as low as ESO.

I also average 70+ FPS in overworld (I have almost the exact same build as you). That has never been the problem with this game.

The problem is the game runs like horse *** in a ton of different content (trials, populated towns, PvP, etc.).

And "using" multiple cores doesn't mean using them efficiently. Run diagnostics while you play this game and you'll see. Neither your GPU nor CPU usage will exceed 40%. The optimization is horrifyingly bad.

If you think this is "good" performance, you haven't played many video games before.

Ngl, I would kill for 70fps in PvE content XD

Irfind

And here i am in murkmire with 60fps and drop to 13fps

WillhelmBlack

Not even the computers Zenimax use on ESO live can run the game smoothly.

Hope that helps.