How To Improve Performance

SoLja4HirE · July 2015

Good day fellow soldiers, I will get straight to the point.

I have good FPS in pve I run most settings on medium to high with the most resource intensive settings set lower. I enjoy to do dungeons with my friends and trials, DSA etc. But most of all I really enjoy playing pvp whether its running in the zerg or small organised groups or waiting and ganking innocent straglers running by :P

I understand that pvp will require lower settings and tweaks over playing in pve. My framerates drop really really low when running in the zergs. I would love to know is there a setting I am missing? I have tried many things: Tried playing the game with all settings on LOW, I have also tried playing without any addons enabled and made sure my pc was not doing any background tasks but there is now improvement from my pve settings to changing the settings all to LOW.

In pve I get between 50-90 frames. In busy towns I get about 40- 50 frames. In pvp when running with groups and engaging in combat drops my FPS anything between 14-35 frames and I cant explain this and don’t understand why??
Please if there are any add-ons that anyone knows of or any specific usersettings.txt changes I must make that would be greatly appreciated.

If this helps anyone here is my pc specs:
Intel Core i5 3570k @ 3.4GHz (Have overclocked to 4.0GHz, FPS was the same)
Transcend DDR3 8GB 1600MHz
Seagate 500GB SATA 3 HDD
Gigabyte Z77 UD3H Mobo
Gigabyte AMD R9 280x DDR5 3GB GFx Card (Tried Old and New drivers)
Windows 7 64Bit (Have also tried Win 8 64Bit)

Please assist me if you can...

Tors · July 2015

In PvP your computer is dealing with far more information.

Generally there are a lot more enemys (and friends) to display. Unlike PvE, almost all of these will have their own unique colour schemes from the dye system.

In the zerg (or even near the zerg) you machine is also working out what needs to be drawn if you were able to see the various AOE spells behind walls etc. Particles are a killer. We regulally see a number of groups using this to their advantage (lightning affects are the worst)

Make sure you have particles turned as far down as you can. Turn off all the shadows, water grass etc

hardware wise, you CPU is not the bottle neck, the game DOES run slightly better on a P7, but this is probably increased cache rather than the extra cores (the game is only 32 bit so doesent make use of hyperthreading anyway) Your test of overclocking it shows this.

One simple cheap upgrade would be to ditch that nasty SATA drive and get an SSD. Its going to improove you computer no end. This helps a lot.

I run an I5 system and have around 50-60 FPS in the zerg, but im not too bothered by pretty. All options turned down and only the the enviroment and character set to medium (even to the point of setting my view distance to zero)

Finally, set the ESO.EXE to high priority within task manager.

Or just sod it and buy a better graphics card, but this wont help with the server side lag in cryodil (not that you said you were experiancing this, but I thourght I would mention it before someone shouts at me)

SoLja4HirE · July 2015

Thanks Tors, I have monitored all pc usage statistics, I am currently using Msi Afterburner. It gives me a usage breakdown on all of my components.

According to the graph, My gfx card and RAM, usages. With all temperature running between 50 and 60 degrees celcius and usages are all under 65% and nothing over.
The only usage that is high is on my Cpu. Core 0, Core 1and Core 2 are all between 40% - 60% but on my Core 3 this has about 85% - 95% usage permanently while playing in Cyrodiil

Maybe the bottleneck in my rig is the HDD as you say. I know how fast they are as my notebook has one and its great for work. Never thought I was getting low frames because of data transfer rates though. I think I will go today and buy myself an SSD and assess what to do next.

I also wanted to know if there was perhaps an add-on that is available that allows gfx changes from pve to pvp?

Audigy · July 2015

What you suffer from is a simple CPU Overhead. Your GPU is not able to work at its full potential due the limitations of DX 11. You can not change this by simply buying a better CPU, GPU or HDD as its a software based issue inside the Direct X API.

A new GPU wont change a thing there, the 280x is pretty high class still - but it can not work at its full strength unfortunately, at least not with DX 11.
Buying a new CPU wont make sense either

or an SSD.

When you lag at an MMO, then its almost always a CPU bound problem, as our CPU´s are unable to deliver the packages fast enough to our GPU´s. A package is a finalized frame so to speak, a frame consists of many draw calls and without that "order" our GPU wont start working.

An example to simplify this.

You are in a very crowded restaurant, only one waitress (CPU) is available as the other 6 are on vacation with their BFs. The kitchen (GPU) only works if that single waitress handed in the orders (frame) of the restaurants guests. It will take a huge amount of time to collect all orders (draw calls) from all guests, so that the guys in the kitchen will simply put fall half asleep until they can finally start working.

Same procedure we have on PC, our GPU must wait for its delivery and that delivery (gathering & compiling, translating and finally sending) takes a huge amount of time.

What you can do to improve your FPS is, shutting down anything that puts a strain on your CPU. Use a hardware based soundcard, turn off any background programs, don't use TS / Skype while playing, turn off all addons that you are using and lower some of the settings such as shadows and particles.

The intention is to minimize the so called draw calls, objects that are drawn on the screen. Especially lightning, shadows, reflections and particals require huge numbers there, that's why turning those off will improve performance. However, if you want to play such a game is another thing.