Horrendous memory leak / frame drops recently

Ominer

I've noticed that when I play for around an hour (sometimes longer) my fps drops significantly. I'm guessing there's a memory leak in the game at the minute but the only way to fix is to restart. Sometimes my fps ingame is still indicating that it should be alright but the game looks and feels terrible. I've heard alot of other players comment on this recently too.

BlakMarket

Noticed this today, after hearing about it happening only effected me in Cyrodil that I noticed but I didnt do anything frame intensive before going into cyro.

There was huge thread on this issue, but cant find it unfortunately.

Kirawolfe

I'm experiencing the same issue. Usually my fps is around 180 to 220 (not sure that's entirely accurate, but it's what I'm used to seeing) and everything is smooth. The only time I'd previously experienced stuttering has been with master merchant loading but that's been very temporary.

Now though, I've noticed choppiness/tearing/stuttering while moving around and the fps is dropping to 130-140 (again, don't think this is an accurate number, it's just the only metric I have). Sometimes it's going to 90-120.

What's weird is that if I go to another window (say discord running in Chrome) and linger there for a minute or two, then come back, frames are back up to 220 and everything is smooth. I'm in the same place I was having choppiness before, moving, looking around, etc, but with no stuttering.

It lasts for a while, running around is smooth, and then back down the frames go. Leave to chrome, stay for a minute, come back and it's fine.

It started doing this after the last patch. I've never had this issue before. I run fullscreen. I had multithreaded rendering on, but I turned it off just in case it was doing this, but same thing is happening.

I turned off a few graphic settings, same thing is happening.

Not sure what's going on, but I don't think the issue is on my end.

Kirawolfe

Hi, just want to add that I'm now down to 50-72fps.

Never had this happen before, even with a dolmen in Alik'r, packed with people, with default particle effects for high level graphics.

What's been changed?

blktauna

We shall never know

Kirawolfe

This is still happening.

perfiction

Does it fix once you restart the game? If so, next time try changing your texture quality in settings to anything else (you can change back afterwards) and see if it helps. It works in trials, which are also notorious for frame drops - your fps gets lower after each wipe so if you wipe a lot during a prog you either enjoy the slideshow or change texture settings / restart the game every few pulls.

Kirawolfe

perfiction wrote: »

Does it fix once you restart the game? If so, next time try changing your texture quality in settings to anything else (you can change back afterwards) and see if it helps. It works in trials, which are also notorious for frame drops - your fps gets lower after each wipe so if you wipe a lot during a prog you either enjoy the slideshow or change texture settings / restart the game every few pulls.

It's helped if I go to another window for a few minutes and come back.

This is really new though. I've done Alik'r dolmens with little drop in FPS on this machine, and plenty of trial wipes (sadly) previously without performance hitches like this stuttering. I've been able to play 6+ hour long stretches with no decrease in performance prior to the patch before this very last surprise patch. This isn't lag stutter, btw. It's directly related to processing power.

I run the game at high quality. I'd rather not drop my quality as this is something that happened abruptly with a patch.

I do appreciate you offering some ideas though

Kirawolfe

Oh, and it's affecting menus as well - they stutter. Happens after a length of play. Never had this before and really wish I knew why with ESO.

Kirawolfe

Apologies for the constant updates, I'm just trying to puzzle this out.

I get the stuttering when fps is quite decent too - 150fps, if I've been playing a while. But coming away from the window and going back after a minute fixes it.

phlupp89

I have been experiencing a lot of stuttering recently as well. Not accompanied by significant fps drops tho. It does feel however like they are dropping or there is signifcant lag - it's just not showing.

For me it usually happens after playing for a bit, but doesn't take long. The thing that stands out to me the most: I am completely fine while out of combat. When I finish a fight while barely being able to move or cast anymore (slight exaggeration there), I'll be fine the second the fight ends.

Pure agony one second, smooth sailing the next. It made me assume a combat related addon might be the culprit but even dissabling all addons did not make a difference.

I have changed several graphic settings, but can't find a solution. But it's clearly not a game wide thing, in my circle nobody is complaining about anyhting similar.

Kirawolfe

Another update - I'm keeping a live history of temps in the game while playing.

I did check fans/vents and I did have some stuff over the vents under my laptop (Alienware Area 51-m, RTX2070, i7-9 chip, 32GB ram), and I took it apart, blew it out as best I could.

That's made no difference. Did a fan check, no issues.

I knocked the the quality of shadows to medium and got rid of bloom. That helped the GPU stay at around 75 degrees.

But the CPU was going up to 90-93 degrees, which is really bad. %)

I tried a fix I found elsewhere of setting the Max Cores to 2, instead of the default -1 (which means use all of the cores the game wants to use), and the CPU went down, fps went down a little, but the GPU climbed up again to compensate.

I tried setting Max Cores to 4, and now both CPU and GPU and sitting at 88 degrees. Still high.

I am staring at the corner of a building in Leyawiin, and CPU and GPU are hitting 80 degrees.

What's going on here? This is truly bizarre.

Kirawolfe

I am in the bank, staring at my inventory to set up my trader, and at 83 cpu / 86 gpu. I set Max Cores back to -1 and turned off Multithreaded rendering.

Why is ESO making my computer work so hard when so very little is happening. I have discord open, the Bethesda Launcher, and TTC. That's it.

SeaGtGruff

Kirawolfe wrote: »

I am in the bank, staring at my inventory to set up my trader, and at 83 cpu / 86 gpu. I set Max Cores back to -1 and turned off Multithreaded rendering.

Why is ESO making my computer work so hard when so very little is happening. I have discord open, the Bethesda Launcher, and TTC. That's it.

Well, if you mean the TTC website, doesn't it have a lot of banner advertisements that refresh and change every so often?

Kirawolfe

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Kirawolfe wrote: »

I am in the bank, staring at my inventory to set up my trader, and at 83 cpu / 86 gpu. I set Max Cores back to -1 and turned off Multithreaded rendering.

Why is ESO making my computer work so hard when so very little is happening. I have discord open, the Bethesda Launcher, and TTC. That's it.

Well, if you mean the TTC website, doesn't it have a lot of banner advertisements that refresh and change every so often?

I don't - it's the TTC exe. Used it for almost the entire time of playing. I take no CPU hits when I'm using it. Appreciate the go at troubleshooting though.

Now I've set my quality to medium, and was getting 76-78 degrees on CPU and 86 degrees on GPU, until I got to Leyawiin. Staring at a building corner again, or just doing the outfit station, my cpu jumped up into the 80s again and my fps was around 100 and lower.

This is getting insane. Got a vacuum /blower thing designed for computers coming tomorrow, will see if that helps and it's just dust I haven't been able to find.

Kirawolfe

Brushed out fans, blew them out again, vacuumed them.

In High Isle, just outside the house in the city, medium settings! 90-100fps.

I used to get 200+

Any changes from the latest patches that could do this? I'm at a loss.

Kirawolfe

Sorry, let me correct that - 75-85fps in Gonfalon Bay near the wayshine on medium with minimal people around and not moving. The Max Cores is back to the default setting. What the holy heck.

Kirawolfe

Found this, saw I had like 5 audio drivers running, disabled all but one, same issue.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/74932/quick-fix-for-fps-stuttering

Kirawolfe

Latest update. Medium video settings, set textures to high though because bleah, temps running reasonably - 86 degrees on GPU, around 75 on CPU.

Still getting low frames and stuttering.

Kirawolfe

Both running at 70-75 degrees while running around Eastmarch during holiday event, medium settings.

Getting noticeable FPS dips, stuttering, and menus are continuing to stutter as well.

Memory issue? The game is using 5GB of ram, I have 32.

CrashTest

Something happened after the patch. It's not just you. I hear it often from other people in raid as well.

Also, events always make server lag worse, so that's adding to whatever is wrong in the first place.

Locking the ESO frame rate to half your refresh rate will keep temps down so you can turn your graphics settings back up. You can go to 60fps and still have smooth play if you want even lower temps. I've found using Nvidia control panel works best to limit fps.

If you're overclocking your CPU, turn it off.

N3CR01

Can honestly say I've had no problems whatsoever. My PC is only 4 months old and is pretty good spec tbh.
I have everything on max settings.
Still getting the same fps I always have and have not been getting heavy drops neither.

CrashTest

N3CR01 wrote: »

Can honestly say I've had no problems whatsoever. My PC is only 4 months old and is pretty good spec tbh.
I have everything on max settings.
Still getting the same fps I always have and have not been getting heavy drops neither.

Ok but how does that help everyone having issues?

N3CR01

CrashTest wrote: »

N3CR01 wrote: »

Can honestly say I've had no problems whatsoever. My PC is only 4 months old and is pretty good spec tbh.
I have everything on max settings.
Still getting the same fps I always have and have not been getting heavy drops neither.

Ok but how does that help everyone having issues?

It doesn't but if there was a memory leak in the game, wouldn't every single player been having the issue?

Elsonso

N3CR01 wrote: »

CrashTest wrote: »

N3CR01 wrote: »

Can honestly say I've had no problems whatsoever. My PC is only 4 months old and is pretty good spec tbh.
I have everything on max settings.
Still getting the same fps I always have and have not been getting heavy drops neither.

Ok but how does that help everyone having issues?

It doesn't but if there was a memory leak in the game, wouldn't every single player been having the issue?

Not necessarily, but it does provide data that might help figure out what the problem is, and where the problem is.

Kirawolfe

CrashTest wrote: »

Something happened after the patch. It's not just you. I hear it often from other people in raid as well.

Also, events always make server lag worse, so that's adding to whatever is wrong in the first place.

Locking the ESO frame rate to half your refresh rate will keep temps down so you can turn your graphics settings back up. You can go to 60fps and still have smooth play if you want even lower temps. I've found using Nvidia control panel works best to limit fps.

If you're overclocking your CPU, turn it off.

Hello! Thank you I am always curious to see who else is affected, as I seem to be the only one in our group, which of course makes me try and figure out the issue on my end and make sure it's not just my computer slowly melting XD

I did the UNIGINE Superposition benchmark, just to see where my computer was fairing. On High settings I got a score that sat in the midst of i9 and i7 chips running RTX 2080 gpus, so it seems my laptop is performing as expected?

But everything's taking a nose dive in ESO. I did use VSync prior to reading your post, mostly to stop my CPU and GPU from hitting 200fps in housing or small areas and to keep temps down.

With Vsync on I now stay under 70 degrees on CPU and GPU, however if I go to Leyawiin, Rimmen, Alinor, my fps takes a nose dive to 65-85fps and gets choppy and 'brittle'. XD (I'm really not sure the in-game fps capture is accurate)
That's on medium settings, but with high textures.

Definitely seems related to the number of PCs around, which never seemed to bother my comp before?

And I've never overclocked this laptop. I think I'll run something else on here and see how it plays for comparison.

Sir_Gentleman777

Also make sure all your add-ons and libraries are up to date. If you see an update for an add-on you can also try to delete the saved variables for this add-on (which is also a LUA File, which means an executable script file). The first thing i try if i run into trouble is to delete the add-ons that updated (incl. the saved variables) and re-install them afresh. If that doesn't help i delete all add-ons completely and test again. If there is still an issue i also delete the 3 ZOS config files from the saved variables and let them re-create. If that also doesn't help the issue is with the game itself. If that does help, I go and reinstall the add-ons in batches to find the addon that does cause the issue. It is a painful process, but at least you know where the issue stems from and you can avoid using that add-on until updated or completely.

Also make sure you don't install any libraries blindly and have only the ones you need for your addons. As far as i can see all scripts from the addon folder are loaded at game start, regardless if one is disabled or not. So they exist as unused scripts in memory. This might already cause issues.

Kirawolfe

Sir_Gentleman777 wrote: »

Also make sure all your add-ons and libraries are up to date. If you see an update for an add-on you can also try to delete the saved variables for this add-on (which is also a LUA File, which means an executable script file). The first thing i try if i run into trouble is to delete the add-ons that updated (incl. the saved variables) and re-install them afresh. If that doesn't help i delete all add-ons completely and test again. If there is still an issue i also delete the 3 ZOS config files from the saved variables and let them re-create. If that also doesn't help the issue is with the game itself. If that does help, I go and reinstall the add-ons in batches to find the addon that does cause the issue. It is a painful process, but at least you know where the issue stems from and you can avoid using that add-on until updated or completely.

Also make sure you don't install any libraries blindly and have only the ones you need for your addons. As far as i can see all scripts from the addon folder are loaded at game start, regardless if one is disabled or not. So they exist as unused scripts in memory. This might already cause issues.

This is very interesting, thank you. I did disable all of my add-ons and libraries, but perhaps I do need to take that next step. I used Minion to add them all in the first place, should be easy enough to re-install. Just irritating to customize again XD

CrashTest

Kirawolfe wrote: »

CrashTest wrote: »

Something happened after the patch. It's not just you. I hear it often from other people in raid as well.

Also, events always make server lag worse, so that's adding to whatever is wrong in the first place.

Locking the ESO frame rate to half your refresh rate will keep temps down so you can turn your graphics settings back up. You can go to 60fps and still have smooth play if you want even lower temps. I've found using Nvidia control panel works best to limit fps.

If you're overclocking your CPU, turn it off.

Hello! Thank you I am always curious to see who else is affected, as I seem to be the only one in our group, which of course makes me try and figure out the issue on my end and make sure it's not just my computer slowly melting XD

I did the UNIGINE Superposition benchmark, just to see where my computer was fairing. On High settings I got a score that sat in the midst of i9 and i7 chips running RTX 2080 gpus, so it seems my laptop is performing as expected?

But everything's taking a nose dive in ESO. I did use VSync prior to reading your post, mostly to stop my CPU and GPU from hitting 200fps in housing or small areas and to keep temps down.

With Vsync on I now stay under 70 degrees on CPU and GPU, however if I go to Leyawiin, Rimmen, Alinor, my fps takes a nose dive to 65-85fps and gets choppy and 'brittle'. XD (I'm really not sure the in-game fps capture is accurate)
That's on medium settings, but with high textures.

Definitely seems related to the number of PCs around, which never seemed to bother my comp before?

And I've never overclocked this laptop. I think I'll run something else on here and see how it plays for comparison.

Vsync can cause lag, not just in ESO, but in general. It's not the same as limiting your fps. But vsync + fps limit work well together for best results. You can test to see which works best for your system (fps limit only or vsync + fps limit).

Most gaming laptops come overclocked. An easy way to check is a program called MSI Afterburner. If you know your gpu base clock speed, you can compare it to the number you see in MSI Afterburner and if it's above that number, then you're overclocked. You can use Afterburner to force your gpu back to base clock and even to undervolt, both of which extend the life of your system by lowering temps.

I'm not sure whether it's ESO causing this issue for you or if it's your PC or both. I just know others on PCNA are saying ESO is stuttering for them as well since the patch in OP. All my suggestions are just ways to optimize your gaming laptop especially if a certain app is causing you issues.

tomfant

Maybe the FPS and stutter problem introduced with U33 is now spreading to other specs? The tweak described here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/599878/fps-drops-after-u33 helped for me. I'm still running this setting and haven't problems.

acastanza_ESO

Yes, there is definitely a severe performance degradation that is occurring on this current build. The game will run perfectly fine for a couple hours, then the performance will rapidly deteriorate to random severe performance dips. Restarting the game restores the performance until it degrades again.