10-17 FPS in battles even on low settings

ZoM_Head · October 2014

I am not sure if this is a recent bug or an issue, but i have been getting terrible performance in battles.

I tried it on low, medium, high and ultra and still no change.

Around Cyrodiil smooth 60 FPS on ultra without and issues. When a keep is under attack and i am around 20-30 meters away from the keep, the fps just drops down to 25 or so. When the enemies are then visible it drops down to 10-18 FPS, you can imagin the response i get from my characters.

A few guild members are having "smooth" gameplay, which i cannot figure out how.

Got an i7 980 with a GTX 670 4GB.

Is it just me? or are some of us effect and some are not?

Rylana · October 2014

Yeah its getting pretty stupid to be fair.

I run a medium-range machine that runs almost every other game I play flawlessly on high/ultra settings, but for ESO and only this game for some crazy reason I cant seem to get over 40FPS on a good day (i do get to 60 in four man vet dungeons though)

Near a keep, crash to 15 FPS, stays there til I leave. I am convinced it is siege/shadow rendering on other players bodies, the more bodies present the worse it gets. Then the stuttering starts where ill drop to 0 FPS for like 2 seconds, and jump back up to 15-20. That one I will never figure out, because it implies I am getting a burst of process useage, but my perfmon and other tools dont register thus, nor do I ever see some big "happening" going on when it does either.

I also have this weird bug (that gets me hilariously killed rushing into 24 man groups) where their avatars dont load right away, and I find myself dead not realizing the one guy i charged was actually 20+

The bottleneck seems to be the processor (my graphics card never runs more than 40% utilization while my CPU will run anywhere from 50-70 per core, and will peg during heavy siege battles).

Its strange, I know I aint got the meanest machine, but even friends/guildies of mine with monster rigs experience similar issues with FPS drops, stutter, lag, and client crashes.

supernico · October 2014

Welcome to the club.
I made a thread related to this topic, please contribute so we can find the cause and hopefuly ZoS will give us a solution. http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/132602/pvp-performance-fps-how-to-improve-it

ZoM_Head · October 2014

Thank you, will check it out.

SeltzerDuke · October 2014

Yep, one day we will sit huddled by the fire and tell our grandchildren about the FPS we used to enjoy in Cyrodiil prior to patch 1.2.3. Never quite got "fixed" all the way. And I've also noticed extremely slow graphical loading which can occasionally "stealth" zergs from sight at times- I've learned to wait before getting shielded assault-happy to make sure I see everyone before unintentionally suiciding-by-zerg.

Plus, I've learned to accept that bat swarms, which already can't seem to have normal red circles like any other AOE (if the Arena Stage 9 boss can do it, so can anyone!), just don't show up half the time. If I notice my health suddenly dropping steadily, I just dodge roll away first and ask questions later. Reading in my recap that I was sitting in a swarm I never saw got old fast. Ironically, my allies' bat swarms, when they do pop, seem to load fine just to make sure I waste stam rolling out of them, heh. (See above re: normal red zones would be nice.)

Dudis · October 2014

Tents.

Nah but really, my computer is about 2 generations old at this point and my performance is fine except under extreme circumstances (i'm talking several hundred players on a keep, minutes before server crash kind of circumstances) where my FPS drop into the teens or low 20s.

Roaming the world, I have a steady 120 FPS, in sieges I have a playable 30-60 fps depending on the number of people around.

I've been playing around with settings and found that high/medium/low settings doesn't really make a noticable difference for my FPS, so i just left them all on High.
What did make a very big difference though, was View Distance. Dropping that to 60 was a huge boost to my FPS and didn't really affect the game visually.

If you spend most of your time in keeps, you could drop it even lower.

One more thing I've noticed is that even though my CPU sits at a comfortable 50% load, I got a pretty significant performance boost from overclocking (3.6 to 4.16 ghz).
The same goes for my graphics card, although that sits at 100% load the whole time (915 to 1005 mhz).

Depending on your motherboard and on-board sound, getting a soundcard to offload your CPU a bit might help.

You can also play around with the C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live UserSettings config file and see if anything makes a difference. You get a lot of powerful settings in there that aren't available ingame. Google search a bit to see what they do.

Intel® Core i7-3820 @ 4.16 ghz
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3, Socket-2011
Kingston DDR3 HyperX 1600 MHz 16GB Black
Gainward GeForce GTX 660Ti 2GB PhysX

Corsair SSD Force Series 3, 120GB 2.5"
2x Seagate Barracuda® 7200.12 1TB

jnjapexb14_ESO · October 2014

SeltzerDuke wrote: »

Plus, I've learned to accept that bat swarms, which already can't seem to have normal red circles like any other AOE (if the Arena Stage 9 boss can do it, so can anyone!), just don't show up half the time. If I notice my health suddenly dropping steadily, I just dodge roll away first and ask questions later. Reading in my recap that I was sitting in a swarm I never saw got old fast. Ironically, my allies' bat swarms, when they do pop, seem to load fine just to make sure I waste stam rolling out of them, heh. (See above re: normal red zones would be nice.)

This is very true. People just say "get outta the swarm" but if you can't see or hear it it's kind of difficult. I typically don't even see a health drop or any bats or hear any sound playing, just go from full health to dead. Upon the "awesome" review screen it's a batswarm for 2k with of course multiple fire rings/pulsars.

The game is broken with 20+ people in the screen. <period>

GwaynLoki · October 2014

The difference between max and min settings in large fights for me: 7 fps. Meh.

Morvul · October 2014

same issue: I can play the entire game on ~50-60 FPS on ultra setting (or 100+ fps on lower settings.
But the moment I get close to a siege fight in cyrodiil, FPS drops to ~17 and does not bulge, no matter how low I put the video settings...

ZoM_Head · October 2014

Dudis wrote: »

Tents.

Nah but really, my computer is about 2 generations old at this point and my performance is fine except under extreme circumstances (i'm talking several hundred players on a keep, minutes before server crash kind of circumstances) where my FPS drop into the teens or low 20s.

Roaming the world, I have a steady 120 FPS, in sieges I have a playable 30-60 fps depending on the number of people around.

I've been playing around with settings and found that high/medium/low settings doesn't really make a noticable difference for my FPS, so i just left them all on High.
What did make a very big difference though, was View Distance. Dropping that to 60 was a huge boost to my FPS and didn't really affect the game visually.

If you spend most of your time in keeps, you could drop it even lower.

One more thing I've noticed is that even though my CPU sits at a comfortable 50% load, I got a pretty significant performance boost from overclocking (3.6 to 4.16 ghz).
The same goes for my graphics card, although that sits at 100% load the whole time (915 to 1005 mhz).

Depending on your motherboard and on-board sound, getting a soundcard to offload your CPU a bit might help.

You can also play around with the C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live UserSettings config file and see if anything makes a difference. You get a lot of powerful settings in there that aren't available ingame. Google search a bit to see what they do.

Intel® Core i7-3820 @ 4.16 ghz
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3, Socket-2011
Kingston DDR3 HyperX 1600 MHz 16GB Black
Gainward GeForce GTX 660Ti 2GB PhysX

Corsair SSD Force Series 3, 120GB 2.5"
2x Seagate Barracuda® 7200.12 1TB

when i travel to a keep being sieged, inside just looking at a wall with no NPCs are anything infront of me, FPS is already in the low 20's. The moment i go outside it drops below 20 FPS.

Cody · October 2014

I crashed in thornblade twice in 5 minutes......

Armitas · October 2014

Elmojito1000eb17_ESO wrote: »

Is it just me? or are some of us effect and some are not?

A lot of people, including myself experience the same thing. Same fps no matter what setting you put on. There seems to be no rhyme of reason for why some people are experiencing this and others are not. I also get loading screens while traveling through town on my fast horse. I have an SSD I should not be getting a load screen. I get the same thing where enemies don't load just like Rylana. During a thronblade siege where I was told there were 50 AD and comparable EP I could count about 8 total players, all EP. I could look out the breach and see no AD but I could hear their siege booms.

While my FPS drops to 10 my gpu and cpu are not even running at half capacity. My system wants to do more, but it's not being asked to do more.

ZoM_Head · October 2014

Customer support contacted me, regarding some "connection issues", so i followed the instructions, if anything my character was slow to repond to skills and even did not weapon swap, it was slightly better and worse at the same time.

I am sorry Zenimax, but i am avoiding all pvp/ava content all together, it is not working out for me and others.

Davadin · October 2014

I'm guessing it's server side as well. My PC never hits anywhere near 80% usage (CPU, VGA, RAM, SSD, network, etc...) but it can crawl when there's too many people crowded in, and get me stuck in loading screen for a full 5 minutes... it's ridicolous...

Dudis · October 2014

Armitas wrote: »

Elmojito1000eb17_ESO wrote: »

Is it just me? or are some of us effect and some are not?

A lot of people, including myself experience the same thing. Same fps no matter what setting you put on. There seems to be no rhyme of reason for why some people are experiencing this and others are not. I also get loading screens while traveling through town on my fast horse. I have an SSD I should not be getting a load screen. I get the same thing where enemies don't load just like Rylana. During a thronblade siege where I was told there were 50 AD and comparable EP I could count about 8 total players, all EP. I could look out the breach and see no AD but I could hear their siege booms.

While my FPS drops to 10 my gpu and cpu are not even running at half capacity. My system wants to do more, but it's not being asked to do more.

Do you have any thermal throttling going on? GPUs and CPUs slow themselves down if they get too warm so they don't get damaged.

72 degrees C at 30-40% load seems VERY hot to me.

Have you tried reinstalling your drivers etc?

Dudis · October 2014

Snapped a screenshot while running from one keep to another and added my settings and temps after about a 30 min session.
Image quality got butchered for some reason but meh...

Here's an ESO movie I made, you can see my FPS at the top of the screen (I'm the templar). Take into account that this is while recording.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYyARi62oio

Armitas · October 2014

Dudis wrote: »

Do you have any thermal throttling going on? GPUs and CPUs slow themselves down if they get too warm so they don't get damaged.

72 degrees C at 30-40% load seems VERY hot to me.

Have you tried reinstalling your drivers etc?

I have my fan on auto and it never goes to full speed during the fps lag. I have also put it on manual and turned it and my case fans up but I get the same fps.

72 degrees is hotter than I would expect but most transistors are manufactured to operate at those temperatures. I did take it out and blow it off, checked for any board baking and replaced the heatsink compound. The heat sink compound was showing signs of age but it was still mostly fluid. That was the only thing I could see that would account for some of the undue heat.

I have tried reinstalling drivers, including a fully fresh windows install + drivers. No change in performance.

@Dudis When I went to put my card back in I noticed my intake fan got unplugged. I'm running 20 degrees cooler. Nothing has change on my fps but thanks for leading me to that.