WARNING: ATi R9 290 is NOT a good GPU for ESO!

Johnny_NO_skillz

Hello everyone - so for the past 2 weeks I've been at odds trying to figure out why my very recently built gaming rig was having difficulty running this game at acceptable framerates...

I run the game near max settings with the exceptions being shadows on medium, and water reflections off - with these settings I easily get 50-60 frames per second out in the world quest. However, in cities this all changes. I run at about 35 frames per second, and to make matters worse, all types of movement (regardless of how fast) cause my game to stuttering to the point of unplayable.

I tried everything, updating drivers, overclocking my CPU, installing the game to my SSD - nothing help.

So finally I found my old EVGA 660ti laying around in my closet and decided, just for kicks and giggles, to use it to replace my ATi R9 290.

What I found was my framerate was nearly the same (give or take 5 frames) and that the stuttering was completely gone.

I am mortified. How is it that this card, I bought a year ago, that they no longer even manufacturer, provided a better gaming experience than a $500 card I bought a few months back.

Totally upset by this. Not sure if my 290 is a defect or what... I've never had any problems with it and I ALWAYS treat my computer components well.

Any thoughts?

Specs:
EVGA GTX 660ti ... previous ATi R9 290
16GB RAM
AMD 8350GHz @ 4.20GHz

7Montana7

I have the same card (r9) and while my fps drops in cities, it's always silky smooth and never stutters.

Johnny_NO_skillz

7Montana7 wrote: »

I have the same card (r9) and while my fps drops in cities, it's always silky smooth and never stutters.

What's your CPU? Settings, res?

Tristis Oris

i have the same configuration and can't play on maximal settings. had to reduce view distance to 70, then I can play with high textures. (graphics in the game are not new). FPS in town 30, in world 50-90.
In CoD or Crysis i play on ultra with no problems.

Johnny_NO_skillz

Tristis Oris wrote: »

i have the same configuration and can't play on maximal settings. had to reduce view distance to 70, then I can play with high textures. (graphics in the game are not new). FPS in town 30, in world 50-90.
In CoD or Crysis i play on ultra with no problems.

I love my 290 - it's a great card, but it's just not optimized well for ESO...

KalecStromhir

ESO is heavy on CPU. Currently AMD take s a big FPS loss. If you take your system and replace it with Intel you can see a higher, more stable fps. This is due to AMD poor single thread performance.

Saerydoth

KalecStromhir wrote: »

ESO is heavy on CPU. Currently AMD take s a big FPS loss. If you take your system and replace it with Intel you can see a higher, more stable fps. This is due to AMD poor single thread performance.

Exactly. The 780ti is complete overkill for this game, ESO can never even come close to maxing out a 780ti unless you're trying to play at 4k or something. Thus, with a 780ti, the CPU is always the bottleneck. You would see the same results with a 780, or an R9-290 or 290x on the AMD side (all of those GPU's are overpowered for ESO). In any game where there is a CPU bottleneck, Intel just absolutely *destroys* AMD at this point in time.

The only games where AMD CPU's are competitive, is where the GPU is the bottleneck (example: Crysis 3). CPU bottlenecks are just the nature of MMO's. There is a LOT to process that just doesn't happen in a single player game. You have to realize too, that Bulldozer and even Piledriver are 2 year old outdated architectures now. AMD hasn't made a performance processor for almost 2 years now, and they have said that they don't plan to. The AM3+ platform is obsolete and doesn't support a lot of modern features like USB 3.0 and PCI-e 3.0. And even the extremely expensive FX-9590 (which is a highly overclocked FX-8350) - a 200w monster of a processor, is outperformed by a lowly cheap i3 in CPU-bound games.

Right now, the ONLY place I would ever recommend an AMD processor is where their APU's shine - things like laptops. The AMD integrated graphics outperform the Intel by a VERY large margin, and the Steamroller architecture is an improvement. I would recommend a Kaveri laptop over any Intel based one, unless you are planning on spending a lot of money for a laptop with a high power discrete gaming video card.

Also - in ESO, there is ZERO difference between an i5 and and i7. ESO does not use more than 4 cores. The only reason the 4770k slightly outperforms the 4670k is because it's clocked 100 MHz faster. Overclocking the 4670k to the same speed as the 4770k would result in equal performance.

Tristis Oris

KalecStromhir wrote: »

ESO is heavy on CPU. Currently AMD take s a big FPS loss. If you take your system and replace it with Intel you can see a higher, more stable fps. This is due to AMD poor single thread performance.

54 FPS on top i7 CPU it a not good. it is not something that should be on the top-end CPU for 300 bucks. The problem is really bad optimization for any hardware. At job I have i5 + nvidia and the game works no better.

nalan87sb14a_ESO

I know exactly what ur talking about bro. Its your graphics card isn't functioning correctly . what happens is one of our clocks isn't running right during load. Either ur GPU or vram isn't clocking up like it should be. Hence causing the sluggish gameplay. Even if this isn't the problem the steps to solve go like this, first completely replace drivers including deleting left over data from drivers. If that don'twork next, its being hundred ppercent sure you have a big enough power supply to run that card, if u still have problems return the card.

KalecStromhir

I'm running a 3770k with a GTX670 with very little problems, yet I take my gpu to another system with 8320 both OC to 4.2Ghz and I can not get or maintain 50+ fps constantly.
ESO coding is not the best, but most MMO are cpu bound. This is just the way the coding works. When it comes to other games AMD/Intel can hold there own.

I know the GTX 780 is overkill, but it was part of a bigger test. It is in Russian,
gamegpu.ru/mmorpg-/-onlayn-igry/the-elder-scrolls-online-beta-test-gpu.html

GossiTheDog

It's an engine problem. ESO.exe spawns 32 threads, thread 0 is locked to one CPU core and it does almost all the work. Because of this bottleneck, it can't render frames quick enough.

If you go to PVP, go near a large siege (100+ players) and look up at the sky in 1st person (so nothing rendering), you will see fps of 20-30. If you graph GPU usage you will note in large sieges GPU usage drops to 30-40%. Run away from the players into wilderness and look back up at sky. 60-100fps.

The good news is Zenimax are porting ESO to Xbox One and Playstation 4, and those consoles (not a console bash, I own one) have a 1.75ghz and 1.6ghz clocked processor respectively. So basically, Zenimax are going to have to massively optimize the engine, or the game won't run as in on consoles.

Smasher03

Johnny_NO_skillz wrote: »

Hello everyone - so for the past 2 weeks I've been at odds trying to figure out why my very recently built gaming rig was having difficulty running this game at acceptable framerates...

I run the game near max settings with the exceptions being shadows on medium, and water reflections off - with these settings I easily get 50-60 frames per second out in the world quest. However, in cities this all changes. I run at about 35 frames per second, and to make matters worse, all types of movement (regardless of how fast) cause my game to stuttering to the point of unplayable.

I tried everything, updating drivers, overclocking my CPU, installing the game to my SSD - nothing help.

So finally I found my old EVGA 660ti laying around in my closet and decided, just for kicks and giggles, to use it to replace my ATi R9 290.

What I found was my framerate was nearly the same (give or take 5 frames) and that the stuttering was completely gone.

I am mortified. How is it that this card, I bought a year ago, that they no longer even manufacturer, provided a better gaming experience than a $500 card I bought a few months back.

Totally upset by this. Not sure if my 290 is a defect or what... I've never had any problems with it and I ALWAYS treat my computer components well.

Any thoughts?

Specs:
EVGA GTX 660ti ... previous ATi R9 290
16GB RAM
AMD 8350GHz @ 4.20GHz

What resolution are you running?

Mishoniko

In my experience dropping view distance makes a HUGE difference, especially in cities. I'm running it at 30 on a GTX770 on a i7 960 and get 40-50fps in cities where at 100 I run more like 30fps.

shiva7663

It's just my intuition, but this sounds like a fixable, tweakable technical issue.

tordr86b16_ESO

get the i5 4670k, overclock it to 4.5 ghz - just make sure you have a good cooler, water cooling not needed. my game runs smooth as butter.

and as someone else said here in this thread, AMD no longer makes gaming gpu or cpu's - they are out of that game.

Brakkar

4770k 3.5, evga gtx 780, 8 gb 2133mhz ram, ssd, 1080p screen.
Game runs stable 60 fps.
Didn't have any problems with fps drops, neither in cities, outside, dungeons or PvP ( only some lag, which is natural in Cyrodil ).

Caduryn

tordr86b16_ESO wrote: »

and as someone else said here in this thread, AMD no longer makes gaming gpu or cpu's - they are out of that game.

Sounds like a massive fake.

D34thly

amd GPU's are awesome still although overpriced at the moment due to mining craze and nvidia being UTTER shait in that department they are WAY overpriced. Intel are better at gaming in general, but for myself I wouldn't expect to see a 30+ fps difference between an i7 stock and an 8350 stock

Brakkar

Please don't compare 8350 to 4770k in cpu heavy applications, because there is no comparison.
4770 will always win.

KhajiitiLizard

I use an ATI HD 5670 from 2009, and I run this game on max with no problems.

Audigy

People always make the same mistake, if they got lag its always the GPU...

This however isn't how it works guys, your PC does not only have 1 piece of hardware but many and also software.

The AMD 8350 is almost 50% slower than a basic 2500 of intel, this is where you lose FPS. You save 50 bucks and lose 50% performance, ask yourself if this is worth it.

Sure the 290 isn't very well optimized right now and without mantle support you don't win anything either, but just look at it. My 6970 runs the game perfectly fine on Ultra with everything maxed and hardly drops below 40FPS in cities or crowded area´s.
That said, I noticed a 4FPS loss with 1.06 - wherever this came from.


AMD cards usually outperform those of Nvida in the same price segment. If you don't need 3D always go for AMD, you get more for your money and with Mantle around the corner you get an even better deal once its fully supported in games. To have a card able to run on a low level API is worth a lot more than 3D in my books, plus the wonderful tressfx 2.0 that's around the corner - but this everyone has to decide for himself of course.

The good news is Zenimax are porting ESO to Xbox One and Playstation 4, and those consoles (not a console bash, I own one) have a 1.75ghz and 1.6ghz clocked processor respectively. So basically, Zenimax are going to have to massively optimize the engine, or the game won't run as in on consoles.

I read this before at the forum and again I want to ask to please not spread these rumors around, it only confuses people with problems and gives them false hope.
Consoles are using a low level API that allows many more draw calls than those on PC. You don't need 4Ghz CPU´s at a console, their API is about 9x faster than those of our PC´s.

Consoles are miles ahead sadly, guess why Microsoft and AMD are working on low level API´s since years?


That however doesn't mean ZO cant do better. They definitely can, right now one core is doing the majority of the work, all the rending of characters, object´s happens there instead of evenly spread around all 4. This causes huge issue´s with the FPS, especially on AMD CPU´s with a much lower single core performance.

If this however can be fixed, I don't know. Most MMO´s have those issue´s, maybe its just not possible at these type of games - only shooters based on the cry engine or Frostbite really utilize all cores at the moment.


Don't blame your GPU´s guys, they are in most cases totally innocent