Infamous STUTTERING

zilog256

Hi there. this will be a long post I'm afraid, but I've been struggling for a LONG time.

This is my first post, after finally being able to have an invite to the forum....

Been playing for more than 5 years, CP 2400+, playing every day.

I love the game, its contents, its mechanics... The engine, somewhat less, given the problems I've been experiencing for now YEARS....

I've always had rigs more than enough to handle the game.

Nevertheless, I always experienced sudden lags, stuttering, sometimes for long periods, then no more, etc ; I always blamed it on my weak ADSL (10 Mbits, rather not stable). Now that I have gigabit broadband for a few months, I can rule that out.

SHORT VERSION:

The problem: I experience STUTTERING (not LAG) after some time : when I start the game, eveything is smooth as butter, even in crowded zones. Then, eventually, after 5....10...20 minutes when I'm lucky, the stuttering begins. The ping stays ridiculously low (40-60 ms) even if as we all know, we all have a "500ms feeling" while playing, the fps stay steady in the 90-98 zone on a 100 hz screen.

ONLY solution is to LOG OUT and RELOG ; then everything is smooth again...for a while....rinse and repeat.


I've tried EVERYTHING (check long version for details) but to no avail, and I'm 100% SURE it's NOT a problem on MY SIDE ; It's either an ENGINE problem or a SERVER problem.

What makes me say that? => The more I crank up the settings (distance, shadows, ambient occlusion, Anti-aliasing, etc), the QUICKER the stuttering comes, and the HEAVIER it is. For example, if I play at minimal settings, the stuttering may come as long as after 40 minutes, and it's mild = playable ; If I use maxed out settings, count 5-10 minutes and the stuttering makes me feel I'm playing at 15 fps (choppy as hell) even if the panel states 40ms for the ping and 96 fps.

This is driving me insane, I'm at the point where I begin playing AWAITING for the moment when the stutter comes....I even set a timer to make some stats. It's a fun meta-gaming you might say, but given the hundreds of hours and money invested in ESO+ and extensions, I'm beginning to feel a bit stupid to continue just trying to play with acceptable conditions.

There have been numerous similar threads over the years, I've read them ALL, tried ALL solutions, and I think the general consensus is that the problem is on ZOS's side, that is the usual conclusion each time before/after such threads are eventually closed because they're too old etc.

For the full details, you have the long version


LONG VERSION:

STUTTERING (not LAG), directly scaling with graphics details, arriving quicker and "heavier".

"Funny thing" : when I enter a solo zone (main story) or delve, the stuttering usually magically disappears....funny eh? My hardware or drivers are aware of that? or could it be....ON ZOS SIDE MAYBE?

COMPUTER:

Intel i7 9900K@4.9 Ghz on GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS Pro
Fractal Design Pure Loop 360
2x16 Go Patriot Viper DDR4 3200 40-20-20-16 OC @3866 41-21-21-18 1.4v
SSD NVMe OCZ 256Gb = WINDOWS
SSD NVMe Crucial P5plus 2 Tb = ESO
EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING
PSU= Seasonic Prime 850W
SCREEN = HUAWEI MateView GT 34 (2K)

DRIVERS = lastest Nvidia DCH 551.46 (= those with the "no more stutter" hotfix! I'd laugh.....) ; those are clean drivers with Nvcleaninstall (no telemetry, no GFE, no...)

Hardware is ROCK STABLE, passes OCCT CPU / LINPACK (small FFTs) / OCCT POWER / TESTMEM5 on **24 HOURS** (yes that's how I test my OC/UV)

RTX 3080 is slighly undervolted, a classic, and YES it works FINE.

Windows is on a NVME drive, ESO (Steam version) on another one.

My motherboard has a (known) 'broken' NIC Intel chipset (caused real lags, no software solution) so I use a PCI-E Realtek NIC instead / disable the onboard one.

The PC is only for gaming, no cluttered with tools etc

I'm playing on EU server. ISP= Free/PROXAD

I have HUNDREDS of addons, they use roughly 500 Mb ingame, stable while gaming (I even do a periodic purge with ShissuLUAMemory addon)

Obviously I do not talk of the initial lag when I log in a character, due to MasterMerchant/Libhistoire kicking in etc, this is just at the start and NORMAL.

Multithreading optimization is obviously ON (tried without, no change), for what it's worth, as there is only one core working hard as we all know. Max load on the main core is 80% with maxed out settings / distance etc. But I've had stutter with that core at 30% of course...

All my other games work flawlessly of course

What I've tried (in no particular order or number of iterations....):

- reinstalling windows multiple times : NO CHANGE
- reinstalling the game multiple times : NO CHANGE
- clearing the usersettings.txt : NO CHANGE (except less lag initially because base settings are somewhat "medium")
- deleting shadercache.cooked : NO CHANGE (except less lag initially, IT SEEMS)
- obviously REMOVED ALL ADDONS (I have hundreds, handled with Minion, all work fine) : NO CHANGE !!!
- tweaking the usersettings.txt (ANY trick you saw on the internet I tried!) : NO CHANGE
- tweaking usersettings.txt i manually with a max distance=20 after a clean start : NO CHANGE
- routing all the ESO TCP/UDP ports to my gaming PC : NO CHANGE
- even tried to bypass possible routing problems (they are known too) between my ISP and the servers using FishEye : NO CHANGE
- ALL settings mixes in the Nvidia panel (VSYNC : adaptive, fast, etc, triple buffering, low latency ETC) : NO CHANGE
- VSYNC OFF/ON in the game : NO CHANGE
- G-SYNC OFF/ON : NO CHANGE
- tried the "remove all other audio drivers" : NO CHANGE
- maximum performance on windows settings (CPU+GPU) : NO CHANGE
- deactivated MSI Afterburner/Rivastats as they can cause stuttering (=no undervolting, GPU@normal settings) : NO CHANGE
- Resizeable BAR ON/OFF : NO CHANGE
- Lighter W10 "ReviOS" : NO CHANGE
- ISLC to tweak windows timer @0.5ms / HPET OFF = NO CHANGE
- disabled MPO = NO CHANGE
- disabled Windows Defender : NO CHANGE

I've surely forgotten some stuff, hard remembering all the external tweaks I may have tried.

But I insist on one thing : when I start playing, its a pure pleasure for a handful of minutes....before the fall. The ONLY and simple solution is LOG OUT / RELOG.

If someone has the solution and proves to me that it's a problem on MY SIDE, I'd be more than happy to be wrong, and stay silent forever...

Sorry if I may sound a bit bitter/sarcastic/agressive but I've had it.

So please, ZOS, don't answer to me to file a customer report ingame, or reset my router, or play without addons, my next ESO+ 6 months renewal is within 15 days....and...I'm quite fed up.

vsrs_au

Someone on another gaming forum mentioned recently that they had stuttering on a game, and the solution was to re-insert the graphics card, have you tried that yet?

zilog256

vsrs_au wrote: »

Someone on another gaming forum mentioned recently that they had stuttering on a game, and the solution was to re-insert the graphics card, have you tried that yet?

Thanks for answering and the moral support

Well, I'm ready to try anything (Indian dance, Voodoo rituals) but...

...I have ZERO stuttering in all my other games (Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077....) and the stuttering is not constant, it's happening over time, only in ESO, AND most of all is FIXED by LOG OUT/RELOG! I can't suppose a misaligned PCI-E connector would provoke that?

Do I sound absurd?

zilog256

OK, back after a few days testing multiple Nvidia driver versions....DDU, reinstall, test, again, and again, good use of my time...

Something seems to have happened after around drivers 528.49 : this one has much less stutter but....crashes (mainly in big bosses), frozen computer, reboot needed.

551.x : rather quick and important stutter (used 551.46 & 551.86)

546.65 : major stutter

531.18 , 531.79 : acceptable stutter

512.95 : some stutter

Of course, all of these tests may be completely biased if the stutter depends on random factors on the SERVER side.... So I may come back after a week with the conclusion that 528.49 will finally stutter eventually for "no reason".

Now I'm going to try drivers"around 528.49"(526.x/527.x)... as the driver just after is 528.49 is 531.18 (not good seemingly) or trade the stutter for random crashes.

silky_soft

You turned off the all the nvidia junk? instant replay, overlay, logging and what not?

Small thing, 40-20-20-16, I assume you mean 16 20 20 40 for ram latency.

silky_soft

There's also selecting high power plan in Windows and making sure link state power saving is off.

ESO is very cpu heavy. My 4090 (laptop) will use 40w sometimes.

Sarannah

Games like ESO get constantly updated, meaning more and more modern techniques are used in the updates.

Have an i9 9900k myself, and ESO is very CPU heavy(as someone stated above me). This eventually caused me to stutter as well, though I was able to stop it for a time by using the high performance mode on the ESO exe's. Few updates later(year or so), it came back.

What fixed it completely was getting a 4080 and turning on DLSS(causing less work for the CPU). Atleast for now. But I am going to buy a new computer next week. As the 99xx series is over 5 years old. With how fast technology improves, that is a lot!

PS: Current specs: i9 9900k, rtx 4080, windows 10, samsung 860 pro m2 SSD, air cooled(CPU temp never above 75c in ESO), 4k G-sync monitor(60 hz). (Also have CPU bottleneck issues on other games, like avatar/outcast 2, so it is time for an upgrade)

vrumpet

I had thought to reply to the post having not seen that one line about you using Shissu's, but I just reread and saw it... however, as you didn't explicitly say, I may aswell ask: Have you checked your memory usage when it starts stuttering becase this sounds exactly like what was happening to me when I had a massive memory leak.

I would start the game off at 3.5-4.5gb and it would steadily rise to 8-9gb before I couldn't take it anymore and had to restart. I think the record was over 11gb.
It would happen very fast if I played dungeons. I put this down to huge numbers of effects and skills going off. Strangely it seemed worse if I was using a character with lighting staff. Normal ping, Normal fps, no lag, just headache inducing stutter.

I found there was one add-on that made it much, much worse -Action duration reminder. Removing that (I replaced it with fancy action bar) slowed the leak but did not stop it. I also installed Shissu's though I honestly couldn't say it made a difference

There are many, many threads with people complaining of memory leak but they just all fizzle out with no answer, I suspect because of what happened with me..it just sort of slowly went away after a while, I suspect an update improves something and removes whatever your pc is allergic to.

Also just a note. My cpu is almost 12 years old, and I have no problems with it. I wouldn't go out spending money on new components