Steam issues?

Furyous

I have been dealing with some really annoying micro freezes in ESO. The game will lock up for less than a second every few minutes. This started about three to five days ago. Nothing else on my system has any problems, including BG3 on max settings.

I tried the usual troubleshooting. I turned off addons, stress tested my hardware, and checked for anything obvious. Nothing helped.

Then I noticed something interesting. When I was logged into two ESO accounts on the same PC, only one of them had the micro freezes. Steam only lets you log into one account at a time, so I launched my second account directly without Steam so I could trade between them. The account running through Steam had the freezes. The account running without Steam was completely smooth.

I turned off Steam features like the overlay and cloud sync, but the stutters were still there. The only time ESO runs smoothly is when I bypass Steam entirely.

Unfortunately, only one of my accounts is a non Steam account, so I am stuck with the issue on the others. The good news is that my main account is the one I can run without Steam.

Edit, adding system specs, while not bleeding edge, it is more than enough to run ESO:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/72340797

LennaTheRussian

I also do the same thing as you and have two accounts. I notice that my steam account has poorer performance overall. Lots of hiccups. Wonder whats causing it.

Orbital78

The only issues I've noticed, is that I get small freezes after turning my controllers on after afk timeout.

I was having issues with freezes which would time the connection out when tabbed out multitasking in Win11. Turning windows game optimizations off seems to have fixed that.

Gabriel_H

Do you have discord running? The overlay for it seems to cause intermittent problems since they upgraded to the new one. Tabbing out to another window can cause your character to crouch is one example

Furyous

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Do you have discord running? The overlay for it seems to cause intermittent problems since they upgraded to the new one. Tabbing out to another window can cause your character to crouch is one example

Good insight but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often when I bypass Steam. I run discord with both types of login methods so if it was Discord, I would expect it to continue when Steam is shut down

skyrimfantasy

I've been having the stutters lately too, and my account is thru Steam. Thought it was Reshade so uninstalled, still stutters. I didn't try turning add-ons off as I've seen others already say it didn't make a difference. I did notice while in West Weald that the grass (and only the grass) reloaded when I'd get a stutter so I turned that down to low (despite having an RTX5090) and that seemed to help a bit, the stutters weren't as often.

Furyous

I ran a DSR today and the stutters were back in full force. Steam seems to make the issue worse, but it is not the root cause. I found a thread Here that seems to have helped the problem, I will test a day or two and report back.



Here is the quote from the thread:

Masteroshi430 wrote: »

Try this:
If you have lag problems in ESO since a specific windows 11 update (24h2) (especially during loading screens and occasionaly in game), find you processor specs, it's number of cores and number of threads, open your ESO UserSettings.txt file and find these 3 settings:

SET MaxCoresToUse.4
-> here enter the number of cores for your processor multiplied by 3/4 (n*3/4) (round to the higher integer if the result is not an integer)
SET RequestedNumJobThreads
-> here enter the number of threads for your processor multiplied by 2/3 (n*2/3) (round to the higher integer if the result is not an integer)
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads
-> here enter the number of threads for your processor multiplied by 2/3 (n*2/3) (round to the higher integer if the result is not an integer)

It solved the lag problems for me, don't modify if you have no lag.

If it doesn't work for you because you have an old or very powerful or weird machine, try to decrease the values step by step, but the max cores value has to be higher than the threads one.

ArchangelIsraphel

I've been having this issue on my steam account ever since the windows 11 update (24h2). A couple of things I've done that have helped (though the issue is not completely gone):

1. Go to the .exe for eso (you can also do this straight from the task manager while the game is running) right click, go to "properties". From there, go to "compatibility". Tick the box that says "disable fullscreen optimizations".

One of the more problematic updates for 11 changed it so that windows fullscreen optimizations are on by default. You now have to opt out of them manually. They're causing an issue with the way games render in fullscreen mode by forcing a fullscreen game into a "windowed fullscreen" mode. It causes micro stuttering.

The issue also messes with any kind of overlay, like steam overlay, discord overlay, and nvdia overlay so you'll want to disable those as well.

2. Windows has been forcing steam into "efficiency mode", which while that may seem like a good thing, is actually bottlenecking steam's ability to communicate with the game client, and contributing to micro stutters. You can disable this by right clicking steam in the task manager and toggling efficiency mode off. (You'll know if efficiency mode is being applied to something when you see a little leaf icon next to it in the task manager)

Check the eso exe in the task manager for this as well. It makes windows treat eso as a background task thus depriving resources to it.

I managed to fix the majority of my micro stuttering and freezing this way, though something is still messing with my frame rates/nerfing them by at least 20 or so frames. (Recent windows updates were a real mess for anyone with a NVIDIA card )