Hitching and stuttering after patch

BeardRex

Before the patch, I was playing on ultra settings completely smooth. After, I can't play on ANY graphics setting without a huge amount of hitching (sudden frame drop every few seconds).

Joiku

I am experiencing the same issue. I've had everything on max settings and had no problems with any lag of any sort until the latest patch. For some reason now my FPS is stuttering constantly when I'm moving around. Tried lowering settings but it had no effect. It's bad enough to make the game more annoying than playable. I also had an update on my graphics card's drivers earlier today, but that was a minor update and had nothing on it that would be the source of this problem in my opinion.

Saerydoth

Disable the ESOhead addon. That is the cause of your problems.

notts2000

I can confirm the same problem with stutter here since patch. And yes I do use the eso addon. I will disable to see if it helps. Thanks

notts2000

Yep damn its the addon.

Saerydoth

Expect this to happen every time there's a patch. Systems change, addons break. And outdated addons are a VERY common cause of FPS issues after a patch.

Joiku

Oh man, that worked for me. Many thanks! Didn't even pass my mind that it could be because of addons. /facepalm

Saerydoth

A good rule of thumb. After a patch (any patch), disable all your addons, make sure the game works. Then reenable your addons one at a time and look for issues. That way, you can easily tell which addon is the culprit in cases like this. The reaction to this SHOULD be "Aha, <x> addon is causing FPS issues after the patch, I'll go report it to the addon developer"

Remember, addons are user-created and are not supported, so the onus is on you to make sure they work correctly and don't mess up your game.

jaggedrelief

This forum desperately needs stickies and this should be on it.

Saerydoth

I wish there was a way to request a sticky in the forums. I could type up a nice "Reminder - Addons and Patches" post that would detail everything.

For an explanation as to what's going on - Addons are written in Lua, as is the rest of the UI. It all interacts. If Zenimax changes any of the Lua system calls (which patches very commonly do - both to fix bugs, introduce new functionality, and keep addons from doing things that are not intended), addons that are not updated to use the updated system calls properly, will generate a TON of Lua errors. Imagine 100 error boxes popping up on your screen every second.

Now, the game doesn't actually *display* Lua errors, so you don't see this happen. But it keeps happening, and that's what causes your FPS to drop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

Something else nasty can happen too with addons. Say a particular addon interacts with a system call that was changed to not respond the same way anymore. The addon would send a system call, and wait for a response that never comes, and conceivably enter an infinite loop (depending on how it was written). The infinite loop would cause the game to rapidly take up more memory until it crashed. People would see the crash as a bug in the game when it wasn't at all.

BeardRex

I didn't have ESOHead, but I did disable all my addons and it fixed the issue. I didn't bother trying to figure out which one it is though, except that it's not LootDrop. That's the only one I turned back on.

cliveklgb14_ESO

Saerydoth wrote: »

Disable the ESOhead addon. That is the cause of your problems.

Not using ESO head and have the same problem. ESOhead is not the issue.

Moobs

cliveklgb14_ESO wrote: »

Saerydoth wrote: »

Disable the ESOhead addon. That is the cause of your problems.

Not using ESO head and have the same problem. ESOhead is not the issue.

Do you have any addons at all? Its probably one of them if so. As stated earlier, disable all then enable one by one.

ben.g.schaefercub18_ESO

Signed in just to say THANK YOU! It was getting so bad that I could barely even play in abandoned public dungeons, going from 60FPS to 2FPS and back every time I turned the camera. Now it's back to being smooth as butter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!