Low performance with decent hardware?

tcherkrick · January 2015

Hello everyone, i need help understanding why does ESO is the only game with low performance even when having decent hardware?

I have a desktop with the following:

intel core i7 4770 (3.4ghz)
8gb ram 2133mhz
Nvidia GTX970 G1 gaming graphics card
windows7

hardware which is supposed to run the game smoothly even on ultra-high setting
but apparently there are several places (mostly town and cities) where i get fps between 30-35 fps (i had the same framerate with a Nvidia GTX 760 before i upgraded it).

GPU usage on those moments is below 50%
RAM usage is below 60%
and just two of the cpu cores are over 80% used
the rest of the cpu cores are near 0% used

Why is there a bottleneck on the CPU?
Why are the other cores not being used at all by the game?
Is there a way to fix this problem?
Is ZOS aware of this problem or not?

Maybe the game would need to be optimized, since with every update there's more content to process by the cpu, which would mean that FPS would go lower and lower regardless of the hardware used by the players.

Any official response to this matter would be much appreciated.

ZOS_GaryA · January 2015

Hey there!

There are a few edits that you can do to your usersettings.txt file that may help with the performance issues you're experiencing. Here's some information we posted in another topic that assisted a fair few folks with performance issues.

There are also a few settings in the Usersettings.txt file that you can change to improve your performance. Please close ESO first, then make these changes. This file is located at Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\Live.

As with any document change, we advise creating a back up of the original file in an alternate location. This will allow you to restore your usersettings to their old values in case the new ones are less optimal.

Simply open the file with Notepad and make the following changes:

Change:
SET GPUSmoothingFrames "10"
To:
SET GPUSmoothingFrames "3"

Change:
SET PreferExclusiveFullscreen "0"
To:
SET PreferExclusiveFullscreen "1"

Find this section and Change:

SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"
To:
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "0"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "0"

tcherkrick · January 2015

First of all, i'm thankful for the fast response to my post and i appreciate the help regarding this subject.

I applied the changes above, and tested several times and i have about the same performance as before.
on cities like skywatch i get 30-38 fps

GPU usage is below 40%
RAM usage is below 60%
one core is around 75% used
another core is around 50% used
another core is around 35% used
another core is around 15% used
and all the other cores are steady at 0% used

i don't understand why the game isn't using the hardware properly to run at 60fps?

The computer power management configuration is set to High-Performance, as well as the Video card power management is set to the highest, from the 3D settings in Nvidia control panel.

Is there an optimal set of configuration for 3D configuration in the Nvidia control panel?

I hope there is a workaround or a fix to this problem, so this thread can be useful to other players on the community with my same problem.

Emity · January 2015

tcherkrick wrote: »

Hello everyone, i need help understanding why does ESO is the only game with low performance even when having decent hardware?

I have a desktop with the following:
intel core i7 4770 (3.4ghz)

8gb ram 2133mhz

Nvidia GTX970 G1 gaming graphics card

windows7

hardware which is supposed to run the game smoothly even on ultra-high setting
but apparently there are several places (mostly town and cities) where i get fps between 30-35 fps (i had the same framerate with a Nvidia GTX 760 before i upgraded it).

GPU usage on those moments is below 50%
RAM usage is below 60%
and just two of the cpu cores are over 80% used
the rest of the cpu cores are near 0% used

Why is there a bottleneck on the CPU?
Why are the other cores not being used at all by the game?
Is there a way to fix this problem?
Is ZOS aware of this problem or not?

Maybe the game would need to be optimized, since with every update there's more content to process by the cpu, which would mean that FPS would go lower and lower regardless of the hardware used by the players.

Any official response to this matter would be much appreciated.

Hello dude.

You're not the only one who has this kind of performance issue. Pretty much everyone who's playing ESO has this kind of issue since recent updates. Game doesn't work properly with CPU and GPU. Hope they managed to fix this in update 1.6. I'm already downloading PTS server and I REALLY wanna test it out. If there is gonna be no different ...well the game is not worth to playing it for me personally.

So shame that even people with CPU's and GPU's like I5 / I7 , GTX 760/770/780/970 / Titan can't play ESO on Ultra withount any problems. ....

There is nothing we can do about it im afraid. The only thing that could improve
your FPS is to set this in your game settings.

Shadow quality to NORMAL.
View Distance to 50
All Particle systems to 50%

tcherkrick · February 2015

Just to be clear
After some intensive testing and attempts to improve the performance, i haven't got any positive results.

The configuration in the usersettings.txt indicated by @Zos_GaryA did not worked, and after having tested carefully between having
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"
and
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "0"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "0"
i found out that having the values set as "0" actually decreases the framerate 8-12 frames cosistently. All the other settings, like the
SET GPUSmoothingFrames "3" or the
SET PreferExclusiveFullscreen "1" doesn't seem to make any performance changes.

I made several tests in Grathwood - Elden Root standing in the north stairs looking at the wayshrine, with all settings maxed out, and resolution 1920x1200
and got stable values of 30-32 FPS when having "0" as the value on those options, and 38-40 FPS when having "-1".

Monitored With MSI Afterburner v4.1.0 Hardware usage, and polling every second in the previously mentioned scenario with:
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

38 fps

and i got the following with:
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "0"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "0"

31 fps

Note: each line color indicates a different CPU core.

From this information i can see that ESO is not using properly the hardware to run normally, which brings me back to my initial question.
Is there really something i can do to solve this issue? or is this an optimization issue that Zenimax has to fix?

Any further official information would be much appreciated.