Help Re: Multicore & thread .ini settings

WhyMustItBe

Greetings,

I am attempting to improve the performance of ESO under load and cannot seem to find a definitive consensus on the effect and behavior of certain .INI settings.

Specifically I am trying to get an idea for what MaxCoresToUse.4 actually does. Is this best to leave at -1 (does it reliably utilize all available cores it detects this way) or is it best to set manually. If the later, is this the physical number of cores, or logical cores (twice that)?

There is also a LOT of conflicting info on these two settings on the internet, with no ZOS comments since 2017 that I can find:

SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

What exactly do these settings do? How is it best to go about adjusting them?

Any insight would be appreciated!

@ZOS_GinaBruno

etchedpixels

ESO only appears to use four threads of execution on any hardware I have, most of which has more.

Everything gamewise until recently was optimized on the assumption that desktop processors were 2 or 4 core so it's not a surprise.

danno8

-1 means it has the ability to use as many cores/threads as it wants to (limited by your hardware).

Setting it to specific numbers allows you to lower the maximum number of threads/cores if you want to. Raising it to the maximum or higher will simply allow it to use the maximum.

You could probably set it to 100/100 but it would still only be able to use whatever the maximum is for your system.

There was a time several years ago that setting it lower helped to alleviate specific crashes that were occurring at the time, but those have long since been resolved. You should probably leave it at -1. You won't see any objective improvements by raising it manually to 2/4, 3/6, 6/12 or whatever your core/thread number is on your CPU.

WhyMustItBe

danno8 wrote: »

-1 means it has the ability to use as many cores/threads as it wants to (limited by your hardware).

Setting it to specific numbers allows you to lower the maximum number of threads/cores if you want to. Raising it to the maximum or higher will simply allow it to use the maximum.

You could probably set it to 100/100 but it would still only be able to use whatever the maximum is for your system.

There was a time several years ago that setting it lower helped to alleviate specific crashes that were occurring at the time, but those have long since been resolved. You should probably leave it at -1. You won't see any objective improvements by raising it manually to 2/4, 3/6, 6/12 or whatever your core/thread number is on your CPU.

Thanks so much, that is exactly the clarification I was hoping to find. I had been noticing these weird jumps in CPU activity where all of a sudden my fan would lurch to like 70% for a few seconds then die down, though FPS was still hovering around 40-50. I was worried that my recently having reset my .INI back to the defaults and -1 for these settings might be the cause, but it is probably just a combination of warmer temps and the game making better use of my hardware.