Maintenance for the week of May 6:
• PC/Mac: NA and EU megaservers for patch maintenance – May 6, 4:00AM EDT (8:00 UTC) - 9:00AM EDT (13:00 UTC)
• Xbox: NA and EU megaservers for maintenance – May 8, 6:00AM EDT (10:00 UTC) - 9:00AM EDT (13:00 UTC)
• PlayStation®: NA and EU megaservers for maintenance – May 8, 6:00AM EDT (10:00 UTC) - 9:00AM EDT (13:00 UTC)
A post from a graphics dev about progress on multicore and an FPS tip (from PTS forum)
I have no idea what of this pertains to Live vs PTS, hopefully he doesn't mind me posting it here. (I put some parts in bold)
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.
Edited by personman_145 on April 26, 2018 8:28PM PC: i5 8600k, 16GB DDR4 2666Mhz RAM, GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
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