ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »PTS 1 doesn't have all of the performance improvements, there are a number of additional changes that are rolling out in upcoming PTS iterations. Quad-core machines (without hyperthreading) in particular should see a bump in the next PTS update. We're also tracking down and smoothing out hitching issues, specifically ones people encounter when running through cities and the FPS tanks abruptly for a few frames.
To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
Given that ESO originally had to support very old CPUs, it's no secret that it was written from the ground-up as an effectively single-threaded application. As time went on and the min-spec was updated, and with the launch of Tamriel Unlimited/XB1/PS4, it necessitated the ability to use multiple cores in order for the game to run well (as it should). The work started then and continues through the present.
It's been an ongoing process to shift work over to other cores (and to the GPU) where we can in order to make the game perform better, and the work involved in doing so is fairly complex. It's not something we can point to and say "make all cores do the same amount of work" (though that is the goal!), it's typically "this certain part of the update takes a long time, let's find a way to shift that work over to other cores." Doing that is almost always a bit of a challenge because we have to make sure the cores that do that work don't conflict with things other cores are doing, which can cause corruption, crashes, hangs, etc. We also have to ensure that the changes are positive across all the platforms as well, from the wide range of supported CPUs on Windows + Mac, to XB1 and PS4, so these changes have to come out incrementally to ensure we make the experience better across the board.
We have a lot more work to do here, and we will continue to make improvements. There's always something that can be made better.
PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.
ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »PTS 1 doesn't have all of the performance improvements, there are a number of additional changes that are rolling out in upcoming PTS iterations. Quad-core machines (without hyperthreading) in particular should see a bump in the next PTS update. We're also tracking down and smoothing out hitching issues, specifically ones people encounter when running through cities and the FPS tanks abruptly for a few frames.
To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
Given that ESO originally had to support very old CPUs, it's no secret that it was written from the ground-up as an effectively single-threaded application. As time went on and the min-spec was updated, and with the launch of Tamriel Unlimited/XB1/PS4, it necessitated the ability to use multiple cores in order for the game to run well (as it should). The work started then and continues through the present.
It's been an ongoing process to shift work over to other cores (and to the GPU) where we can in order to make the game perform better, and the work involved in doing so is fairly complex. It's not something we can point to and say "make all cores do the same amount of work" (though that is the goal!), it's typically "this certain part of the update takes a long time, let's find a way to shift that work over to other cores." Doing that is almost always a bit of a challenge because we have to make sure the cores that do that work don't conflict with things other cores are doing, which can cause corruption, crashes, hangs, etc. We also have to ensure that the changes are positive across all the platforms as well, from the wide range of supported CPUs on Windows + Mac, to XB1 and PS4, so these changes have to come out incrementally to ensure we make the experience better across the board.
We have a lot more work to do here, and we will continue to make improvements. There's always something that can be made better.
PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.
RaddlemanNumber7 wrote: »So, if my GPU is running at near 100% on PTS that's a good sign that my CPU is working a lot faster than it does on live, where my GPU is usually about 40% ?
ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »PTS 1 doesn't have all of the performance improvements, there are a number of additional changes that are rolling out in upcoming PTS iterations. Quad-core machines (without hyperthreading) in particular should see a bump in the next PTS update. We're also tracking down and smoothing out hitching issues, specifically ones people encounter when running through cities and the FPS tanks abruptly for a few frames.
To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
Given that ESO originally had to support very old CPUs, it's no secret that it was written from the ground-up as an effectively single-threaded application. As time went on and the min-spec was updated, and with the launch of Tamriel Unlimited/XB1/PS4, it necessitated the ability to use multiple cores in order for the game to run well (as it should). The work started then and continues through the present.
It's been an ongoing process to shift work over to other cores (and to the GPU) where we can in order to make the game perform better, and the work involved in doing so is fairly complex. It's not something we can point to and say "make all cores do the same amount of work" (though that is the goal!), it's typically "this certain part of the update takes a long time, let's find a way to shift that work over to other cores." Doing that is almost always a bit of a challenge because we have to make sure the cores that do that work don't conflict with things other cores are doing, which can cause corruption, crashes, hangs, etc. We also have to ensure that the changes are positive across all the platforms as well, from the wide range of supported CPUs on Windows + Mac, to XB1 and PS4, so these changes have to come out incrementally to ensure we make the experience better across the board.
We have a lot more work to do here, and we will continue to make improvements. There's always something that can be made better.
PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.
sirinsidiator wrote: »ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
The game has my CPU and GPU pretty idle all the time on all the highest details and yet I still have frame rates below the 100fps limit half the time. Here is a preliminary comparison between live and PTS cpu usage.
It's not really telling us much since the PTS doesn't have many players and effects in Vvardenfell/Vivec City and I also used a lot less addons on PTS, but it does look like the load is spread out a bit more. Will be interesting to see how additional performance optimizations in the next PTS cycles change it.
ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.
sirinsidiator wrote: »ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
The game has my CPU and GPU pretty idle all the time on all the highest details and yet I still have frame rates below the 100fps limit half the time. Here is a preliminary comparison between live and PTS cpu usage.
It's not really telling us much since the PTS doesn't have many players and effects in Vvardenfell/Vivec City and I also used a lot less addons on PTS, but it does look like the load is spread out a bit more. Will be interesting to see how additional performance optimizations in the next PTS cycles change it.
The reason why you will most likely never see 100% CPU usage is because those cores have to wait for each other to finish what they are doing in order to move on to the next round of calculations.
Multicore CPU's are truly at their best when each core is doing it's own thing with a completely separate program running on each core independent of each other.
If they are all part of the same program, then you have dependencies and it becomes a balancing act of how much splitting up of calculations is best. It's almost a trial and error thing.
BTW, if your GPU is not getting enough of a workout, you can always bump up your resolution or use some DSR 4K or something. It looks pretty, you can turn off AA and get some eye candy out of that hardware.
Now that I see what AlexT wrote, I'm waiting for the next iteration of the PTS. I only had one crash with the current one
(I used the crash report for Z to see it). But it seemed like the game was running worse than live. Could be my cpu though
(i7-6700, which is an older chip).
ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »PTS 1 doesn't have all of the performance improvements, there are a number of additional changes that are rolling out in upcoming PTS iterations. Quad-core machines (without hyperthreading) in particular should see a bump in the next PTS update. We're also tracking down and smoothing out hitching issues, specifically ones people encounter when running through cities and the FPS tanks abruptly for a few frames.
To give more technical details for those who are interested, you should not expect even distribution across your CPU cores after this update, just more distribution to the non-main-thread cores than you had before, especially at times when there are a lot of things loading in. Your main core thread will still be topping off, trying to go as fast as it can through each frame. For almost all of you, the bottleneck of your framerate is your CPU, not your GPU, so if you're not seeing high utilization of your GPU, it's most likely because the CPU-side of the game isn't keeping up.
Given that ESO originally had to support very old CPUs, it's no secret that it was written from the ground-up as an effectively single-threaded application. As time went on and the min-spec was updated, and with the launch of Tamriel Unlimited/XB1/PS4, it necessitated the ability to use multiple cores in order for the game to run well (as it should). The work started then and continues through the present.
It's been an ongoing process to shift work over to other cores (and to the GPU) where we can in order to make the game perform better, and the work involved in doing so is fairly complex. It's not something we can point to and say "make all cores do the same amount of work" (though that is the goal!), it's typically "this certain part of the update takes a long time, let's find a way to shift that work over to other cores." Doing that is almost always a bit of a challenge because we have to make sure the cores that do that work don't conflict with things other cores are doing, which can cause corruption, crashes, hangs, etc. We also have to ensure that the changes are positive across all the platforms as well, from the wide range of supported CPUs on Windows + Mac, to XB1 and PS4, so these changes have to come out incrementally to ensure we make the experience better across the board.
We have a lot more work to do here, and we will continue to make improvements. There's always something that can be made better.
PS: Pro tip, if you have a good GPU and have all your settings maxed but want higher performance, change your Reflection Quality to Low instead of Medium or High. "Low" reflections are actually using screen-space reflections, rather than heavy-duty planar reflections. Planar reflections are more accurate, but they're far harder on the CPU, whereas screen space reflections are almost entirely a GPU operation and should lighten the load on your CPU quite a bit.
Are you talking about Water reflections details ? Cuz this seems absurd taking in mind that in most of the Cities there is NO WATER.
Are you talking about Water reflections details ? Cuz this seems absurd taking in mind that in most of the Cities there is NO WATER.
I think those Reflections are actually more than that. This also includes metallic surfaces, the shine on leather armor, etc. At least they seem to change if you change that as well. Maybe the text is outdated or needs to be rewritten?
Are you talking about Water reflections details ? Cuz this seems absurd taking in mind that in most of the Cities there is NO WATER.
I think those Reflections are actually more than that. This also includes metallic surfaces, the shine on leather armor, etc. At least they seem to change if you change that as well. Maybe the text is outdated or needs to be rewritten?
clocksstoppe wrote: »Are you talking about Water reflections details ? Cuz this seems absurd taking in mind that in most of the Cities there is NO WATER.
I think those Reflections are actually more than that. This also includes metallic surfaces, the shine on leather armor, etc. At least they seem to change if you change that as well. Maybe the text is outdated or needs to be rewritten?
Definitely not. This game does not use physically based rendering. Specular reflections are not part of the reflection setting the dev is talking about.
clocksstoppe wrote: »Definitely not. This game does not use physically based rendering. Specular reflections are not part of the reflection setting the dev is talking about.