[TIPS] Improving FPS

vsrs_au

After a horror day yesterday playing ESO, when my FPS dropped down to about 15-20, and my ping got over 500ms, with the usual odd behaviour (e.g. weapons not working, hostile NPCs just standing there doing nothing, etc.), I made an effort to improve my FPS. I couldn't find any forum thread dedicated to this, so started a new one. If there is such a thread, I won't object to the moderators moving or closing this one

Improving my FPS is particularly important in my case: I play ESO on PC and use the EU server, but I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, well over 15,000km away from that server, so my network ping is generally 300-400ms, so this combined with low FPS makes the game a bit tough to play sometimes.

Now to get to the point! Here's a collection of tips to improve (i.e. increase) FPS during ESO gameplay:

The first thing you want to do is check the FPS and ping before and after the following changes. To view these in ESO, open the chat window, and type: /latency
This will make it show FPS and ping in the lower-left corner of the ESO window, and the above command doesn't need to be rerun: FPS and ping will still show after you've quit and rerun ESO.

1. Download System Explorer, a free utility that is like Windows Task Manager, but with more features. One of its useful features is that you can set the priority of a process, and make it persistent. In plain language, that means you can make ESO run in High Priority mode every time you run it, which helps performance. You can get System Explorer from here: http://systemexplorer.net . I scanned it after download, and it was clean.
2. To set ESO to always run with high priority:
   • run ESO
   • in System Explorer, find and right-click the ESO process eso64.exe, select priority | high. Then right-click it again, and select priority | permanent
3. in the Windows search box, enter the search text "adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" and press Enter. In the dialog window, select visual effects | adjust for best performance. This has an effect on your entire desktop, not just ESO, so keep that in mind.
4. in Windows Explorer, right-click eso64.exe (location depends on your specific ESO configuration), select properties | run as administrator, and select properties | disable full-screen optimizations (the latter, despite the name, is supposed to improve fps in full-screen graphical games).
5. in Windows settings, select Graphics Settings, select desktop app, select Browse then browse to and select eso64.exe, then set graphics preference for this app to High Performance.
6. you can of course also modify your ESO graphics preferences in the in-game settings dialog windows, but that's a topic probably already discussed elsewhere numerous times. Generally, lower settings mean better FPS, but the tradeoff is a less visually-appealing scenery.
7. one final tip to increase FPS is to use the new "render_thread" setting, added in the "Waking Flame" DLC update (warning: labelled as "beta" in the ESO settings user interface). You may not see this setting in the ESO settings user interface after the first restart after the DLC patch is installed, but no worry: just exit the game, edit the UserSettings.txt file for the game, and change the "render_thread" option from 0 to 1, save the file, and restart the game. You will hopefully find that not only has the FPS increased a bit, but your graphics GPU usage has also increased (in my case, it went from 50% to 100%). I believe this is the main reason this setting increases the FPS: the game is better utilising the graphics GPU.

I hope you find some/all of this useful. Obviously system settings changes that work for one person may not work for others, so I can't guarantee this will improve your FPS, but it certainly worked for me. My ESO game is much more playable than yesterday.