I have the recommended requirements, playing on Mac. At first the game played smoothly. Then instead of having the "play" option, it downloaded more, and that's happened a couple times. Since the last download, framerate issues and lag/jerkiness are so bad it's impossible to play at all. I can barely move my character.

A friend added this (I only understand the VRAM part): IMAC from 2008 with a 3.02Ghz Core2 Duo, 4g DDR2, and a geforce 8800 GS with 512 total VRAM. Began having severe performance issues immediately after ESO patched on 03/12. Prior to the update the graphics settings were on medium and getting 30+ FPS. After the update the framerates went from over 30 and stable to under 5 and stuttering. The ingame graphics settings were still set to medium.

Based on the loading times and jerky-spiky framerate it looks to me like ESO is having difficulty with the available VRAM, but that's not enough to explain the sudden loss in performance. To troubleshoot, I turned the texture resolutions from medium to low, reduced particles from 1024 to 768, and turned off bloom. This provided about 5-6 fps boost and smoothed some of the stuttering but it's still under 10 fps and drops below 1 fps seemingly randomly.

I suspect there was either a change to the shaders or a new post-processing effect we couldn't turn off.

I heard from Customer Service asking for a Game Consultant test; the button does lots of nothing, and when they sent a link, I can get a copy of the Game Consultant, but not open it, with my iMac saying: “Game_Consultant” is damaged and can’t be opened.

I have a bootcamp partition running Skyrim, but frankly I didn't buy the Windows, and it doesn't work with Steam (seriously, I have no idea how the same friend got it running at all), so that doesn't seem like much of an alternative.

My total RAM is 4g, and the known issues recommends adding more, I get that, but for now just want the way it ran at first back - maybe not awesome, but smooth and easily playable.