GPU Throttling in Open World, but fine in Player Housing

Cathexis

I have recently encountered a strange and confusing problem, where-in my gpu usage seems to be being throttled for no apparent reason when I am in open world.

In player housing, my gpu usage is split across my sli cards at around 40-60% and I see frame rates at about 60-100fps

In open world, my gpu usage seems to scale down to about 20-30% on both cards and my framerate sits at about 30.

I am trying to understand what is throttling my graphics, and why this only seems to be affecting open world play.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Edit; Further testing has indicated this is not an issue with sli, as the same load to fps ratio drop is experienced with sli disabled (from 98%-100% load @ 60-100fps in player housing VS 50-55%~ load @ 30-40fps in open world).

The game obviously plays just fine at higher load and frames but for whatever reason the performance cuts in half in the playable areas.

danno8

It's probably this:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/241603/fps-drop-over-time#latest

Very old thread, very old bug. Any new thread that gets made about it gets locked and the moderator points you to the useless "What to do if ESO is having performance issues on PC?" faq, which naturally does nothing for you.

Cathexis

danno8 wrote: »

It's probably this:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/241603/fps-drop-over-time#latest

Very old thread, very old bug. Any new thread that gets made about it gets locked and the moderator points you to the useless "What to do if ESO is having performance issues on PC?" faq, which naturally does nothing for you.

@danno8 I appreciate you pointing me in the direction of a more elaborate thread, as it has gave me some insight into the problem.

While my problem does not seem to be quite the same, as it seems to be zone related, rather than an fps over time problem, at a glance the thread has given me some ideas about what to look at. From what I gathered thus far the problem (if it relates to this issue) is either cooked into directx 11 piping on Windows 10, a particle based leak, or some sort of addon issue. I will continue to look into the thread but I am not optimistic about finding many client side options.

I also noted in one of the ZoS posts they talk about a particle cap to reduce memory load, which to me might explain the zone based drop in fps. I had noticed a drop in aesthetic quality as well between player housing and open world zones. I had decreased my particle systems settings to save on performance, but if the particle system settings are acting as a throttle, this might explain the drop (although it is a longshot).

Any other insights from anyone would be welcomed.

Cathexis

And the quest for better fps continues...

After stripping down all my settings, I by accident stripped down view distance last and it was the only setting that had any impact on the 40fps cap.

The fps cap was directly proportional to view distance.

@danno8
Testing in low population areas.
At 100% view distance, fps was capped at 40.
At 50% view distance, fps was capped at 50.
At 0% view distance, fps was capped at 60.

With all other settings at 100% (shadows, water off), performance only showed a variable max of 0-5fps drop with view distance at 0%

No add-ons.
No sli. (Sli had more impact on the overall stability of the GPU load, than the fps - having a higher capacity load allowed for higher settings without crashing but had no impact on those settings in game performance).

Edit;
After applying shaders on low (which as I understand it has no effect on the quality of shaders but rather how much shade is rendered and in what pattern) and water reflect to off (because my cards are old, water effects created no visual difference), and SSAO (looks nicer to me than HBAO) my standing fps was about 54-56. Without SSAO, standing fps was 60-63.

This was in test mode, my GPU core overclock can handle another 20-25 points of increase, and I can further bring up performance by playing in realtime although this has a propensity to cause variable stability issues and input lag. Fps does drop when engaging with the environment, but weirdly turning off anti-aliasing or sprinting increases fps while engaging.

Note; view distance does not have this effect at all in player housing, which means that it seems like there is something inhibiting fps with view distance in open world zones, because it is being reduced to static values when view distance is increased from 0.

Testing in cities with low-moderate player traffic all settings had minimal impact on performance, which typically hovered at 40 fps standing and between 30-40 while doing anything (not tested with view distance).

Edit; Upon further digging I have uncovered that this could be an issue with power usage https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/125637/low-fps-but-untaxed-cpu-gpu-solved

AMD Cool and Quiet and excess power consumption from peripherals may be the culprit.

Edit edit; After making some bios changes, cool and quiet was already disabled, but unplugging excess peripherals and changing other bios settings improved overall performance by about 10-20 fps. In particular, I found that HPET had not been enabled correctly and that may have been a significant contributing factor. I am sitting at about 45-55fps (50-52 standing still) in populated areas - although view distance still contributes significantly to capping frames, and my GPUs are still only operating around 55% load.

danno8

If rezoning (or reloading the game) doesn't cause your FPS to shoot back up, then it isn't the same issue as the thread I linked.

Good luck.