Multi-core Performance Update, Improvement or Deterioration?

labambao · May 2018

No difference to me, but after summerset i have FPS drop from 100 to 10 and back to 100

Hopestealer · May 2018

My overall feeling is that things have improved>
I( have noticed it especially in battlefields

Sicsoo · May 2018

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

totally nailed it, tho, as i tried with general numbers on jobthreads and workder threads also before the patch i saw a total reduction of cpu usage overall and maximal fps go down like by 15fps. so i think, at last for me, it comes with a price (nothing serious tho, as minimal fps are what count for me). much props, a great finding and proper solution for the actual problems of freezes and also for little stutters. i'm on a 3570k@4.5.

ZOS_AlexTardif · May 2018

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

Lunerdog · May 2018

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

Thank you for that explanation, I was going to have a faff about with it but now I shall have a mug of coffee instead and wait for the fix

Thumbs up to @ramasurinenpreub18_ESO for the research he's done too

Trinity_Is_My_Name · May 2018

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.[/quote]

Thank you for the information! Very much appreciated!

thestud2012 · May 2018

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

I really appreciate your transparency. Hope the fixes work out!

Septimus_Magna · May 2018

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

What do you set if you have a 6 core, 12 thread CPU?

Catsmoke14 · May 2018

I tried the suggested settings in the usersettings file.

It reduced the stutter but did not get rid of it. FPS dropped by about 20 (or more) to about 50 in Vulkhel Guard.

Loading after wayshrine travel seemed much longer. So, I put the three settings back to "-1". YMMV.

Fairly humble I5 4460 with 16 GB RAM and AMD RX 480, Win 7. Shadows and Reflections on "Low".

I guess I'll just stutter around until a fix gets implemented.

Edit: more accurate estimate of FPS drop.

Idinuse · May 2018

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

What do you set if you have a 6 core, 12 thread CPU?

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "-1"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

Atm I also suggest to set

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET SHADOWS "0"

Grimm13 · May 2018

NewbieOKS wrote: »

Grimm13 wrote: »

NewbieOKS wrote: »

Cinbri wrote: »

So, I did deleted UserSettings and after logging back on highest video settings I got 100fps in Summerset, while previously I could only dream to get at least 60fps in eso at all, so it helped me a lot. But when I told friends to do same - their fps sugnificantly droped, and they had to restore old settings. So, it veery messy thing.

So better delete or leave it as it is? I mean I read on reddit, we just change the settings notes? Set max corrs, requested number job threads and worker threads?

Rename the settings folder then see how it goes. If worse then roll back to the old by deleting the new folder and restore the name on the old.

I renamed it and when i login it seems the game setting up again like from a new fresh start....fps was increased compared to the old settings even no significant drops in a crowded big area ....

Now that it's better you can delete that renamed old file.

CiliPadi · May 2018

Idinuse wrote: »

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "-1"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

Atm I also suggest to set

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET SHADOWS "0"

Are the -1 values the game defaults?

Idinuse · May 2018

CiliPadi wrote: »

Idinuse wrote: »

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "-1"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

Atm I also suggest to set

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET SHADOWS "0"

Are the -1 values the game defaults?

Yes they are (use all available i.e.). I've been trying 0 and 4 and 1 (I have a 4 core 4 thread CPU though) but found the above to give me best fluidity in the game. But ymmv.

I would however also suggest to set SET GPUSmoothingFrames "0" or "1".

Voxicity · May 2018

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

Thank you very much for this explanation, it's greatly appreciated

Acrolas · May 2018

I have been reading that 'Feature update to Windows 10, version 1803' available May 18th, caused some people to have frame rate and other game performance issues. An easy fix suggested was to uninstall and reinstall your graphics driver.

That may have helped a little, but the bigger issue I'm seeing now is since 1803 and Update 18, my graphics card temperature is running hotter than I'm comfortable with. I've been shopping for one but now I'm at the point where I should replace before the one in the computer actually melts.

TheHsN · May 2018

after patch my FPS is aweful ... that change was very very very bad for my game experiance

Kronuxx · May 2018

You know, I tried deleting shader cache and user ini file to recreate new one. I also disabled all add ons. I still get stutters which correspond to fps drops. The performance is worse in this patch than prior to Summerset. Also, I've noticed hitching even at the character selection screen. @ZOS_AlexTardif

Gprime31 · May 2018

Improvement by 20-30% getting stuttering intermittently though

Lake · May 2018

Acrolas wrote: »

I have been reading that 'Feature update to Windows 10, version 1803' available May 18th, caused some people to have frame rate and other game performance issues. An easy fix suggested was to uninstall and reinstall your graphics driver.

This update definitely hit my FPS. Too bad I no longer have the option to roll back!

Vararrand · May 2018

Windows Version - Windows 7 (Service Pack 1) (64 bit)
System Memory - 64 GB
CPU Type - AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight-Core Processor
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390X Series - Adrenalin v. 18.5.1
Memory GDDR5 8192 MB
Core Clock - 1055 MHz

Since Summerset, I have to deal with two Problems. My system (specs above) have in between stutters for a second every once in a while. My mother, having a slightly different setup with less memory and non-X R9 graphicscard had a Crash-to-Reboot every time after login screen, when she tried to start Eso since the update.
I first checked that the latest chipset- and graphicscard drivers as well as system updates and mainboard bios where installed, but this, as well as a repair of Eso didn't solve the problem.

So, by investigating the perfomance, I saw that with every stutter, cpu cores swaped loads for a moment before swapping back, indicated here by the red circles:

(Ryzen has 8 cpu's with 2 virtual cores each, resulting in 16 shown cores)

I read in another thread here about Mac uses having problems with multi-core sine the update, so I gave it a shot and tried to set the allowed used cpu's to 4 virtual cores, as Eso basically always only has 2 primary cores in use and some 'calculating noise' on the others. This solved my stuttering and it also resolved the crashes on my mothers computer completly.

So for everyone else also having this issue, here is how you can set the used amount of cpu's, However you have to set this every time after launching the game and before login:

I nevertheless request that this is fixed, because it's actually quite annoying beside all the other issues and bad design decisions recently. Thank you.

hakainoarashi · May 2018

With my R5 1600X i use this:
SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "12"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "12"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "12"
it works perfect!

Drummerx04 · May 2018

I'm not sure if anyone has pointed this out yet. The performance in cyrodiil almost ALWAYS improves dramatically after a content release because half the normal pvp population goes to experience the new content. Once they get bored, they pile back into pvp and performance suffers until the next content release.

idrankyourbeer · May 2018

4690k, gtx 970 and 16 gb of ram running off an ssd here and the game in general runs fine at 1080p, but ever since the summerset patch im getting the same 'freezing' going on every now and then that lots of people are talking about

hopefully this can be patched

other than that it still runs nice and smooth. except if im running dolmens in the desert and theres like 50 other people around spamming magic attacks and heals. then the framerate also tanks into the mid 30's but thats to be expected i guess

i dont really do much pvp but if i got that little microstutter during the heat of a battle and i died, that might enrage me a little bit. it like freezes for half a second and theres nothing i can do.

i dont know if the patch really did much to improve my overall performance or not, most of the time on my graphics settings i can easilly hold 120 fps on my settings (in usersettings i changed it to SET MinFrameTime.2 "0.00833333" to change the default 100fps hard cap) and its been pretty good to me. but the only thing i did notice is the random microstutter/freeze, which never happened to me before since i switched over from console to pc a year and a half ago

profundidob16_ESO · May 2018

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

What do you set if you have a 6 core, 12 thread CPU?

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "6" (or -1)
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "6"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

the game must be fully closed while you make these changes

profundidob16_ESO · May 2018

CiliPadi wrote: »

Idinuse wrote: »

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "-1"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

Atm I also suggest to set

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET SHADOWS "0"

Are the -1 values the game defaults?

yes, -1 stand for "maximum value available"

profundidob16_ESO · May 2018

Idinuse wrote: »

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

What do you set if you have a 6 core, 12 thread CPU?

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "-1"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "-1"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"

Atm I also suggest to set

SET HIGH_RESOLUTION_SHADOWS "0"
SET SHADOWS "0"

NO, that's wrong. The first 2 lines perfectly ok but the stuttering will stay until you change the "-1" in the third "RequestedNumWorkerThreads" line (= max cores) into "1" (limit the jobs into a single thread so they don't have to wait for eachother -which causes the stuttering- )

thoroughly tested and verified last weekend

disclaimer: the information I provide might become invalid when they possibly fix the cause in the upcoming patch of today. IF that happens then "-1" for the work might actually become the better value

jcaceresw · May 2018

Hello. Its normal that my game now crash several times? It happens (mostly) when I just port to a way shrine and it begin to stutter, however the ESO crash report appears. I never had it in the first days of patch release but it is much more frequent in the last 3 days. I fear the patch is killing my new PC I bought it because of the CPU feature.

profundidob16_ESO · May 2018

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

@ZOS_AlexTardif

HAH ! The threads waiting on eachother (referring to my earlier post below) confirmed, I realized it the second I read the brilliant find by Ramasurinenpreub (all credit to him) and I'm glad to see that not only you read it but also gave us confirmation which is equally important because as you probably know we're rats in the dark without 2-way communication with devs as we flip switches after every patch hoping to gain a clue

Your transparancy is appreciated (and we would welcome even more of it...)

I tested thoroughly last weekend myself with all values and came to the conclusion that as soon I use anything more than 1 single thread for the work processes the stutters reappear, whether I set it to 2,4 or 6

Was gonna post it but you kinda beat me to it so I'm looking forward to retesting after the new patch goes live

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

You're correct! The momentary freeze is indeed because of some processing that runs on a worker thread, so you may well see that issue occur less frequently (or not at all) by doing what you've stated, however the impact of reducing your worker thread count to 1 means that only a single thread is able to perform all of the background work that the game demands. This means you would have longer load times, slower in-game streaming, and potentially lower frame rate than you would have otherwise. This is because much of the work done for this patch was to offload main thread work to worker threads so that it wouldn't slow down your framerate. The new stutters are situations when the main thread finds itself waiting on something a worker thread is doing, which is not good, and didn't show up in our internal testing environment. We have a number of fixes for these situations on the way, so we recommend changing those settings back after we patch these fixes in to see if it improves your experience.

profundidob16_ESO wrote: »

ramasurinenpreub18_ESO wrote: »

The massive freezes feel like a thread collision related to player character model loading, where the main game thread passed off the loading to other cores, but they weren't ready with results when asked for them. The freezes happen most often and severely when approaching wayshrines, especially in Artaeum and Alinor, where a lot of people tend to go AFK.

I've been messing with the UserSettings.ini settings for multicore, restricting the number of threads a bit. The freezes are definitely coming from the "WorkerThreads" line, as setting it to 0 removes them entirely, but at the loss of a little fps in general, while setting them to 8 turns the entire game into a near constant slideshow. With the settings below I have managed to completely remove all the freezes and stutters, in Alinor and everywhere else. Framerate now seems to be about the same as pre-patch. Smooth as silk. Maybe give these a try until they get a proper fix in.

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "8" (if you have a quad core hyperthreading cpu, if not use "4")
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "1"

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "0" or "1" can be very helpful with general smoothness and microstutters, as well as input lag and responsiveness if you have a high end GPU. "0" is best if you can get away with it.

Cheers.

amazing find. I agree that big fps drops happen in the trials or situations where you are with a lot of persons and it could be the threads 'waiting' for eachother too long:

@ZOS_AlexTardif I hope you read all this...

xaraan · May 2018

I've seen zero improvement and getting a lot of freezing/stuttering.

James-Wayne · May 2018

Can we work on reducing lag from Oceania next been upwards of 450 since launch 2014