Never ever going to be fixed... Cyrodiil in a nutshell

MaxwellC · February 2018

Correct me if I'm wrong but no ESO live this year has mentioned any steps in how they intend to improve ESO, there has been no further testing mentioned with the intention of fixing or stabilizing PvP, and there has been no update to what changes will arrive to stabilize PvP.

It's getting out of hand and the lack of outrage is amazing especially with how long we've been placed on the back burner with lack of any form of updates such as even addressing the topic and giving detailed steps that have been tried thus far.
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Maxwell/video/44638373

Laquey · February 2018

Are you talking about Cyrodil? If you are one of the big issues there is Draw Calls.

If lyou ooked at your CPU usage for ESO you'd noticed that it burns through one of your CPU cores to almost maximum and touches maybe 2-3 others at a much lower level. This is because the OpenGL / DirectX 11 API the game uses is pretty much a single threaded operation with most of the draw calls being processed on this one core and limiting the amount of graphics surfaces / lights / people doing stuff you can see to a pretty fixed hard number something like 10/12 thousand surfaces. This doesn't go very far when you have huge battles with lots of action with hundreds and hundres of players around one objective.

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board. This will allow a massive expansion of the ability of ESO clients to process draw calls and reduce the lag / DCs and increase performance accross the board.

A good article on this is located here at Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11223/quick-look-vulkan-3dmark-api-overhead

On a standard benchmark test for GTX1060 and you have the following:
Millions of draw calls on GTX1060:
Vulkan: 26.4
DX12: 20
DX11 MT: 2.4
DX11 ST: 2.3

That's at least a 10 times improvement on drawing throughput on the same hardware simply by changing the API that's being used on a 4C/8T system. Would be interesting to see what happens on one of AMDs 8C/16T systems.

The long and the short of that is it would take a long time to reprogram the ESO clients to update them for this new API as well as testing it but it would result in vastly higher performance in environments where you have a LOT of draw calls happening (Cyrodil).

Bevik · February 2018

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

Chaos2088 · February 2018

I used to have lots of problems with pvp, to the point where I could not play anymore due to endless loading screen or loading screen of death.

I updated my pc.....ok I got a whole new one....and well I don't really have any problems. (puts shield over face ready for the burn and the backlash). Maybe its time to update the system? I am assuming as I don't know what you are running

Turelus · February 2018

Bevik wrote: »

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

The problem is the development time to do that probably isn't viable. I mean depending how rooted in it is you could be talking about remaking most of the game to change the engine.

Personally as the armchair dev that I am I think they should be looking at solutions like Brain in a Box which CCP/EVE considered. The idea of boxing up stats so the servers have less checks. Google a video if you're really interested I am pretty sure the presentations about bit are still around.

Last I heard that Dev had moved to Riot though which is why it never really made it into EVE.

ssorgatem · February 2018

Laquey wrote: »

Are you talking about Cyrodil? If you are one of the big issues there is Draw Calls.

If lyou ooked at your CPU usage for ESO you'd noticed that it burns through one of your CPU cores to almost maximum and touches maybe 2-3 others at a much lower level. This is because the OpenGL / DirectX 11 API the game uses is pretty much a single threaded operation with most of the draw calls being processed on this one core and limiting the amount of graphics surfaces / lights / people doing stuff you can see to a pretty fixed hard number something like 10/12 thousand surfaces. This doesn't go very far when you have huge battles with lots of action with hundreds and hundres of players around one objective.

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board. This will allow a massive expansion of the ability of ESO clients to process draw calls and reduce the lag / DCs and increase performance accross the board.

A good article on this is located here at Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11223/quick-look-vulkan-3dmark-api-overhead

On a standard benchmark test for GTX1060 and you have the following:
Millions of draw calls on GTX1060:
Vulkan: 26.4
DX12: 20
DX11 MT: 2.4
DX11 ST: 2.3

That's at least a 10 times improvement on drawing throughput on the same hardware simply by changing the API that's being used on a 4C/8T system. Would be interesting to see what happens on one of AMDs 8C/16T systems.

The long and the short of that is it would take a long time to reprogram the ESO clients to update them for this new API as well as testing it but it would result in vastly higher performance in environments where you have a LOT of draw calls happening (Cyrodil).

You may find it interesting that I play ESO on Linux through Wine, but using DXVK (a D3D11 implementation in Vulkan) and, on my Vega 56, witht he RADV Vulkan driver, I get better FPS at 4K than on Windows 10 with native D3D11.

Sadly, DXVK doesn't work well with AMD's Vulkan driver (which does not yet fully support Vega GPUs), so I can't test whether DXVK provides more FPS on Windows, but it may be worth a try for those without Vega GPUs.

ssorgatem · February 2018

Bevik wrote: »

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

Removing 32 bit support is the first step in the right direction, to focus on the capabilities of 64 bit systems.

Turelus wrote: »

Bevik wrote: »

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

The problem is the development time to do that probably isn't viable. I mean depending how rooted in it is you could be talking about remaking most of the game to change the engine.

Personally as the armchair dev that I am I think they should be looking at solutions like Brain in a Box which CCP/EVE considered. The idea of boxing up stats so the servers have less checks. Google a video if you're really interested I am pretty sure the presentations about bit are still around.

Last I heard that Dev had moved to Riot though which is why it never really made it into EVE.

Well, the game engine is modular enough to support different backends; it currently supports at least OpenGL and D3D11 (though not simultaneously in any platform anymore).
It wouldn't be too hard to implement a new backend in Vulkan.
In fact, a "Vulkan" string as a backend option was datamined from the PTS .exe some time ago, so we may actually see a Vulkan renderer for ESO in the future.

altemriel · February 2018

Laquey wrote: »

Are you talking about Cyrodil? If you are one of the big issues there is Draw Calls.

If lyou ooked at your CPU usage for ESO you'd noticed that it burns through one of your CPU cores to almost maximum and touches maybe 2-3 others at a much lower level. This is because the OpenGL / DirectX 11 API the game uses is pretty much a single threaded operation with most of the draw calls being processed on this one core and limiting the amount of graphics surfaces / lights / people doing stuff you can see to a pretty fixed hard number something like 10/12 thousand surfaces. This doesn't go very far when you have huge battles with lots of action with hundreds and hundres of players around one objective.

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board. This will allow a massive expansion of the ability of ESO clients to process draw calls and reduce the lag / DCs and increase performance accross the board.

A good article on this is located here at Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11223/quick-look-vulkan-3dmark-api-overhead

On a standard benchmark test for GTX1060 and you have the following:
Millions of draw calls on GTX1060:
Vulkan: 26.4
DX12: 20
DX11 MT: 2.4
DX11 ST: 2.3

That's at least a 10 times improvement on drawing throughput on the same hardware simply by changing the API that's being used on a 4C/8T system. Would be interesting to see what happens on one of AMDs 8C/16T systems.

The long and the short of that is it would take a long time to reprogram the ESO clients to update them for this new API as well as testing it but it would result in vastly higher performance in environments where you have a LOT of draw calls happening (Cyrodil).

did not ZOS say in some interview that they plan to use direct X 12 in the near future? or I remember it wrong?

Bevik · February 2018

ssorgatem wrote: »

Bevik wrote: »

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

Removing 32 bit support is the first step in the right direction, to focus on the capabilities of 64 bit systems.

Turelus wrote: »

Bevik wrote: »

It would be really nice if the could rework there engine because that is the massive thing which limiting them to create something bigger.

The problem is the development time to do that probably isn't viable. I mean depending how rooted in it is you could be talking about remaking most of the game to change the engine.

Personally as the armchair dev that I am I think they should be looking at solutions like Brain in a Box which CCP/EVE considered. The idea of boxing up stats so the servers have less checks. Google a video if you're really interested I am pretty sure the presentations about bit are still around.

Last I heard that Dev had moved to Riot though which is why it never really made it into EVE.

Well, the game engine is modular enough to support different backends; it currently supports at least OpenGL and D3D11 (though not simultaneously in any platform anymore).
It wouldn't be too hard to implement a new backend in Vulkan.
In fact, a "Vulkan" string as a backend option was datamined from the PTS .exe some time ago, so we may actually see a Vulkan renderer for ESO in the future.

I really wish they are going to do something with the graphic engine. A lot of people avoid PvP or big scale PvE because of the low FPS and lags. I can go down to 3 FPS during them. Really sad. And i've got i7 6700, GTX1070 abd 16 GB RAM and the game is on an SSD.

Plus it's too much effort to lower the graphics and turn off all the add-ons.

And better don't talk about the ugly textures and the dated models in some cases.

Mayrael · February 2018

Laquey wrote: »

Are you talking about Cyrodil? If you are one of the big issues there is Draw Calls.

If lyou ooked at your CPU usage for ESO you'd noticed that it burns through one of your CPU cores to almost maximum and touches maybe 2-3 others at a much lower level. This is because the OpenGL / DirectX 11 API the game uses is pretty much a single threaded operation with most of the draw calls being processed on this one core and limiting the amount of graphics surfaces / lights / people doing stuff you can see to a pretty fixed hard number something like 10/12 thousand surfaces. This doesn't go very far when you have huge battles with lots of action with hundreds and hundres of players around one objective.

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board. This will allow a massive expansion of the ability of ESO clients to process draw calls and reduce the lag / DCs and increase performance accross the board.

A good article on this is located here at Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11223/quick-look-vulkan-3dmark-api-overhead

On a standard benchmark test for GTX1060 and you have the following:
Millions of draw calls on GTX1060:
Vulkan: 26.4
DX12: 20
DX11 MT: 2.4
DX11 ST: 2.3

That's at least a 10 times improvement on drawing throughput on the same hardware simply by changing the API that's being used on a 4C/8T system. Would be interesting to see what happens on one of AMDs 8C/16T systems.

The long and the short of that is it would take a long time to reprogram the ESO clients to update them for this new API as well as testing it but it would result in vastly higher performance in environments where you have a LOT of draw calls happening (Cyrodil).

I was never interested in ESO API, but I suspect that reworking such enormous API on that scale would be much harder and took longer than writing it from scratch, this means it will probably never happend - to expensive in comparision to expected income.

MaxwellC · February 2018

@Laquey
ESO performance has always been this bad aside from a certain patch when performance took a massive nosedive in the name of "We need to curb dem bots yo" and "We need sum new lightz boyz".

This is on an Xbox One and ESO isn't compataible with DX 12 to my knowledge and I do doubt that will be in anyway effective; I do know DX12 has better performance when rendering polygons,etc but I feel if that was the sole issue i.e. not using DX12 well we would've had that addressed 2 years ago instead of being on year 4 pretty soon, with no fix in sight nor a mention from staff like @ZOS_Ginabruno

MaxwellC · February 2018

@Laquey
Also in the clip it was soo laggy that I literally broke free from CC twice even though I'm suppose to have immunity after the first CC break and that wasn't even a large battle. The issue I think stems from the patch and just plain outdated architecture + a poor engine/server composition.

Alcast · February 2018

Revenge of the Deer

Apache_Kid · February 2018

Laquey wrote: »

Are you talking about Cyrodil? If you are one of the big issues there is Draw Calls.

If lyou ooked at your CPU usage for ESO you'd noticed that it burns through one of your CPU cores to almost maximum and touches maybe 2-3 others at a much lower level. This is because the OpenGL / DirectX 11 API the game uses is pretty much a single threaded operation with most of the draw calls being processed on this one core and limiting the amount of graphics surfaces / lights / people doing stuff you can see to a pretty fixed hard number something like 10/12 thousand surfaces. This doesn't go very far when you have huge battles with lots of action with hundreds and hundres of players around one objective.

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board. This will allow a massive expansion of the ability of ESO clients to process draw calls and reduce the lag / DCs and increase performance accross the board.

A good article on this is located here at Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11223/quick-look-vulkan-3dmark-api-overhead

On a standard benchmark test for GTX1060 and you have the following:
Millions of draw calls on GTX1060:
Vulkan: 26.4
DX12: 20
DX11 MT: 2.4
DX11 ST: 2.3

That's at least a 10 times improvement on drawing throughput on the same hardware simply by changing the API that's being used on a 4C/8T system. Would be interesting to see what happens on one of AMDs 8C/16T systems.

The long and the short of that is it would take a long time to reprogram the ESO clients to update them for this new API as well as testing it but it would result in vastly higher performance in environments where you have a LOT of draw calls happening (Cyrodil).

So what does this mean for those of us on consoles

knaveofengland · February 2018

with pvp /pve balancing i do think it be far easier to have seperate skills for pvp a whole new set , keep the skills as they are for pve and make new ones for pvp then they have a better balance

Saturn · February 2018

It's a lost cause mate

I mean just look at the rest of the game, it performs as poorly as Cyrodiil now. It's like they don't care about performance as long as you can still log in and use the crown store...

Sav72 · February 2018

@Laquey

Great Reply!!!!

Post like this, reminds me why I come back to read forums.

kenjitamura · February 2018

Laquey wrote: »

The solution to this problem is to use Either DX12 on Windows and Vulkan on Mac or just Vulkan across the board.

Mac doesn't support Vulkan. Vulkan could very easily work on Mac if Apple did the bare minimum and setup the plumbing for it but they decided they didn't want anything to get in the way of Metal adoption and refuse to support Vulkan.

Because of this Khronos is working on an API that only supports the feature sets of the lowest common denominator between DX12, Vulkan, and Metal. If someone programs in this new API it will be possible to have it directly compiled into native DX12, Vulkan, and Metal. But they're still working on it. Of course the performance/features will be slightly worse than if the coding were done entirely in the native API but it's still a good compromise.

eso_lags · February 2018

@Laquey Hes on xbox. I dont think what you were saying would help since it is xbox. And personally i dont think anything on the player end ever helps.

I have talked to a couple players who have buisness quality internet (300mbs +) apparently and they told me they didnt lag. But on the other hand i have talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of players who have the same issues that the rest of us have anywhere in this game that people group up in one zone (especially cyrodil)

MaxwellC wrote: »

Correct me if I'm wrong but no ESO live this year has mentioned any steps in how they intend to improve ESO, there has been no further testing mentioned with the intention of fixing or stabilizing PvP, and there has been no update to what changes will arrive to stabilize PvP.

It's getting out of hand and the lack of outrage is amazing especially with how long we've been placed on the back burner with lack of any form of updates such as even addressing the topic and giving detailed steps that have been tried thus far.
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Maxwell/video/44638373

This will never be fixed. Check out this thread if you already havent.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/4882570#Comment_4882570

Some of us have been complaining about this for a year+. The sad thing is this gets no mention from devs or anyone at zos, like you said. Nothing in eso live, nothing on the log in screen, nothing on the main website, and pretty much nothing on the forums. What we are lucky to get is " we are aware of the performance issues and are actively working on it". That may have been good enough a year ago, but it is not good enough today.

This has been getting worse and worse and worse. Since morrowind it is out of control. So many good players GONE from the game. So many of my friends GONE from the game. Why? Not because they are upset with the direction of the game or the mechanics, no, because of lag. Because players who want to play pvp, and not brainlessly zerg, just cant do it. You cannot play effectively like this. Maybe in shor at 2 in the afternoon on a tuesday (sometimes). But if there is a decent amount of people on (not even pop lock) you're screwed. And vivec? Vivec is literally unplayable.

How game developers can give the silent treatment on an issue like this is beyond me. And its sad. So many people i know, myself included, love the game but just cant pvp. Sure i can do other things, and i do, but all the undaunted zones are popular so if you duel there you are getting pretty bad lag too. No one duels anywhere else. Ya i can pve but at the end of the day i get bored and want to pvp but i cant. And the saddest thing is it will never get fixed. We will be lucky to have it mentioned on eso live within THE NEXT YEAR. Idk how this ends, but it doesn't look good.

And i main xbox and have 200 CP on PC. Thought I would get some better performance on PC. Went into vivec, its just as bad. Some of us try to work around these things, zenimax does not try to help or fix the issue.

MaxwellC · February 2018

@itzTJ
Yup been at this for years now and again nothing has been done about the performance this game continues to suffer from.

Karivaa · February 2018

Yes but what about cyrodiil in Xbox?!