Credit where credit is due—in this case, KhajitFurTrader.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

And possibly ZENI's own chris.dillman. Read on.

After weeks of frustrating crashes, often minutes into the game, and then minutes again after the next login, and so on, I just played a thoroughly enjoyable session of ESO, and quit when I had enough—not when the game 'decided' to go POOF!

What made the difference? I read the list of graphics settings recommended by the aforementioned KhajitFurTrader (original thread can be found here), and applied those settings.

Graphics quality: Custom (modified from Ultra-high)
Texture Quality: High
SubSampling Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Medium (down from high, the single most performance improvement)
Water Reflection Quality: Medium (default)
Max. Particle Systems: 1024 (default)
Particle Suppression Distance: 50 (default)
View Distance: 60 (down from 100)

Everything else is ON, with the exception of VSYNC, which is and stays OFF.

Additionally, I did the following, as suggested by chris.dillman:

Find eso.app in the finder.
Select it
Chose: File Menu / Get info
Turn on Prevent App Nap.

My gut tells me that it was the adjustment of the video settings that did the trick, but who knows—it could have been the combination.

Only a considerably longer play session will tell whether my problem is definitively solved, but that in itself is encouraging given that, as I said above, ESO kept crashing on me minutes into the game over the past weeks.

As a side effect, my frame rates have improved as well.

So, a big hand for some truly constructive contributions to these forums.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

Okay, so today I had one crash after about 30 mins play time, upon entering the Harborage. Could be random. I wonder, though. If, after making the above changes, initially the time between crashes is fairly long, followed then by increasingly frequent crashing, what could that mean? Is some file getting corrupted, or is memory leaking? Remains to be seen, I guess. So far, definitely an improvement, but we'll see. Cautiously optimistic.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

So this is interesting, in a sad way. Relaunched the game, and this time it quit after about 2 mins of play, but instead of crashing to the reporter, it hard locked my entire system—couldn't tab out, nor force quit, just the frozen ESO screen and a spinning beach ball. Definitely not pleasant. I'm stumped as to what changed, and after the initial improvement led to things being worse than before.

Sigh... I'm beginning to think I need some time off from this. Pity, really. But no game is worth bringing down my entire system with it.

This does not detract from my enthusiasm over the insightful suggestions mentioned above—if it was rendered premature, it's because ESO's woes are apparently beyond the skill of even very savvy Mac users (much less Zeni's tech support) to heal. Just one of many bugs in this title, I guess—and for me, this one seems to make the game unplayable.

KhajitFurTrader · November 2014

Thank you for your kind words.

There are some things worth to keep in mind concerning ESO's graphics:

The overall Graphics Quality setting determines some things which are hidden or implicit, i.e. they cannot be set through any UI option. One of these is how shadows are rendered. This can gravely impact FPS. Sometimes it may work out better to set the overall Graphics Quality at a lower setting, then turn individual sub-settings up, than the other way round.
People have reported that deleting UserSettings.txt and ShaderCache.cooked sometimes helped with solving new issues after a patch (the game will reset to defaults and build them anew).
I found it helpful to re-set Graphics Quality from Custom to a default quality setting (Ultra-High in my case, YMMV) after a patch. Often, default values would change for individual settings. Setting them back to their formerly customized lower values, or leaving them at their new lower defaults can help with improving performance.
Drawing shadows is costly. Drawing better quality shadows more so. See the first point in this list: Shadow Quality is easily the biggest performance hog.
Texture Quality, View Distance, and Anti-Aliasing are the biggest memory hogs. The lower the amount of video RAM of the CG, the more impact these settings will have (i.e. lowering them might help a ton).
(general) MMOs are not like other online games, not even like online first person shooters or team shooters. In order for the rendering engine to draw anything, it needs to know what to draw. To draw it, it needs to be in memory. An SSD is maybe a 100 times slower than RAM, a HDD a 1000 times. But the network, which tells the game what there is to draw in the first place, is easily 100.000 times slower than RAM. So in an MMO, FPS is not only directly dependent on local speeds, but on remote speeds as well (there's only so much trickery that can be done before things start getting awkward). Some of these remote speeds might be determined by server process threads; some of which by peering (data exchange) between different tier ISPs; only some of which in the local network (the only one that can be influenced by the user; it's important to remember to banish torrenting teenagers ).
VSNYC needs to stay off. Search for "Moonraker VSYNC" within this forum and you'll see why.

The reason why on the one hand some users are constantly reporting (new) issues, especially after patches, and on the other hand some users report everything is fine (or things even improved for them), is that there are a whole freaking lot of variables to the game (or meta-game). But as long we are able to a) report our issues, and b) exchange possible solutions, workarounds, and hints, all is well (i.e.: not worse).

P.S.: I just saw your follow-up posts. Interestingly enough, there have been more posts about frequent crashes in the other parts of the Supports Forums as well. So this might not be related only to the Mac client. Small consolation, I know.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

I think it's never small consolation to know that you're not the only one experiencing a problem.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

Got email from tech support... turn graphics to medium, they say. I do it. Game crashes almost at once. Guys, this is hard to say, but... I think it's not me, it's you. And there are other fish in the sea.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

This is a bit of a duplicate post, but I thought in closing (as far as I'm concerned regarding this headache, and ESO, at least for the time being) I should say it here, too.

Another email from tech support. They've pretty much thrown in the towel at this point, blaming Yosemite and pointing out that optimizing games is—and I paraphrase—really, really complicated, and maybe one day it'll get better, because—I paraphrase once more—"it's not us, it's them."

Nothing to do but wait, I guess. Not to turn this into an "I quit" thread, but I think it's obvious that at this time, there's hardly any point in renewing my subscription. Maybe at some point in the future when this issue has magically disappeared (as it came), I'll stop by again, although I might be reluctant to plunk down $15 just to see if the game still crashes.

KhajitFurTrader · November 2014

Well, Apple is notorious for a) incorporating outdated OpenGL drivers into their current OS versions (we're literally talking about year old drivers, not months old), an b) badly optimizing them. So there is nothing surprising and new on this front.

Have you tried starting with a fresh UserSettings.txt file yet? I'd leave nothing untried in order to get more stability, but that's just me.

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

I did that, deleted the 'cooked' file you mentioned, reset all graphics to medium—no good. I'll try all that stuff, naturally, at least until my current sub runs out (or rather, until we take off for Thanksgiving).

In the end, it matters little of course whether Zeni screwed this up, or whether Apple's drivers are to blame; the solution appears to be as hard to track down as the source of the problem itself, and since I can live very well without ESO, stepping away for a time seems a better strategy than fixating on this—for me at least.