PC/NA- Are you experiencing a screen stutter? (after June 4th patch)

Savos_Saren · June 2018

Since the latest update- I've experienced more and more of a screen stutter. The latest patch (from June 4th) hasn't resolved this issue. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Vapirko · June 2018

Doesn’t seem like much was fixed at all tbh. There were a LOT of issues and they don’t seeem to have addressed any of them. Except invisible dead deer, that was important apparently. Still get fps hitches though.

LaRoseNoire · June 2018

Yeah, it is a problem with new core distribution, and ZoS forgetting to change the base settings.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/414257/severe-freezes/p1

Here is a solution, and it worked for me, changing the settings from documents file. I had like 5-7 screen blackouts per day, now im fine.

LaRoseNoire · June 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.

DanteYoda · June 2018

Yes slightly weird kind of dsync happening.. Really wondering if its the latest Nvidia drivers...

Mine were set as

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

Also, setting GPUSmoothingFrames to "10"

Is that normal?

runagate · June 2018

Certainly my client hasn't stopped crashing. Upon signing in, loading in a character, other completely random times while playing.

Thogard · June 2018

lot of different issues that people are confusing for each other. what works for one issue probably won't help with another issue.

If you're getting the stutter, you can try disabling half your threads.

Goto task manager, rightclick ESO.exe, goto details. Rightclick eso.exe in details, click set afinity, and deselect every odd number thread (1,3,5,7) so that only even ones are left (0,2,4,6)

see if that helps. It might or might not, but AFAIK that's the stutter that WAS fixed on this last patch.

idk · June 2018

Thogard wrote: »

lot of different issues that people are confusing for each other. what works for one issue probably won't help with another issue.

If you're getting the stutter, you can try disabling half your threads.

Goto task manager, rightclick ESO.exe, goto details. Rightclick eso.exe in details, click set afinity, and deselect every odd number thread (1,3,5,7) so that only even ones are left (0,2,4,6)

see if that helps. It might or might not, but AFAIK that's the stutter that WAS fixed on this last patch.

This is something different and seems to be new.

Yes, I am getting random stutters and yes my shake is set to 0, has been and double checked it.

phaneub17_ESO · June 2018

That thing that used to drop me from 100 FPS down to 2 seems to be gone though, the random hiccup stutter still there.

RinaldoGandolphi · June 2018

See the thing is, Multi-core CPU's and gaming really don't go well together and never will, at least not in the way people think.

Hyperthreading and multi-core CPU's were designed for two things:

1. Crunching numbers in highly parallel server scenarios.
2. To allow consumer PC's to run "more then one program" at a time while lessen the CPU sleep and wait cycles between multiple programs.

the biggest benefit to multi-core CPU's on consumer systems is the ability to run multiple programs at once. For example, on a 6 core CPU Say you could have Firefox, Facebook, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and HWMonitor all open at the same time. Since you have 6 CPU cores, your OS doesn't have to constantly transition CPU time from multiple programs on a single core, as it can simply assign each program a core to use. huge performance increase, great thing.

However, the same thing is NOT true when you have a single program trying to spawn multiple threads across multiple cores. This creates conditions with transactions penalties, and their are penalties when transitioning data across multiple cores. As NASA found out when doing research on Hyperthreading, there are many scenarios where hyperthreading either shows no improvement, or actually hurts performance because resources such as Cache is being shared by multiple programs at the same time.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/papers/saini_s_impact_hyper_threading_2011.pdf

Gaming sadly, is one of those use cases that once you go beyond 4 cores the benefits begin to hit a VERY hard diminishing marginal return wall. The difference in FPS between say a 4 core CPU and a 4 core Hyperthreaded CPU in most games with the same clock speeds is less then 10% in most cases.

Hyperthreading was designed to be used in server applications to crunch numbers, Intel just decided to use it as a marketing tool to sell more CPU's. This lead to the "core wars" between Intel and AMD that picked up where the Ghz war of the mid to late 90's left off.

the best use of CPU's with more then 4 cores comes when your playing a game but also streaming or recording video for example or doing multiple tasks as those extra cores will allow your OS to do OS tasks or run other programs without taking any resources away from the cores currently running your game.

Also, Multi-threading and multi-core are NOT the same thing. there are many cases where its beneficial to run multiple threads off less cores or even run multiple threads off a single core....if your not crunching numbers, their is a drastic performance hit when it comes to transitions, sleep and wake times, and cache clearing on CPU's. This becomes even more important with the Spectre and Meltdown patches that implemented KPTI(Kernel Page Table Isolation) as many servers found out, transactions became more expensive which is why so many server centers had to upgrade hardware.

this long wall of text has a point, I promise! I just don't like people leaving without learning something new.

ESO really isn't a game that's going to get much benefit from multi-threading or multi-core. the bottleneck is, and always will be network related. their server has trouble keeping up in say PVP or when large numbers of people are spamming abilities. It doesn't matter how many cores you have when they are always waiting for data to be received server side before they continue processing.

Single player games can and have seen some benefit from multi-core and multi-thread simply because their is no network bottleneck, and devs can put main renderer, sound system, physics, lighting, shadows, etc on different threads and cores. Even though its not going to be 100% scaling like hyperthreading was designed to be when crunching numbers server side, it will be a good improvement moving forward.

multi-core and multi-thread in online games will always be held back until network gets better...once the average ping is below 20ms, then we will see these cpu's really be able to stretch their legs in online games...we will probably get their worldwide in another 30-40 years as cable, fiber optics, and new technologies are brought about to increase speeds between locations

Anyways, good luck folks!

idk · June 2018

@RinaldoGandolphi

Yes, there are challenges for gaming to utilize multi-core well mostly due to the real time aspect of gaming. However, outside of actually programing the game to utilize multi-core the biggest issue has been DirectX 11 since it could only handle one thread at a time, essentialy. DirectX 12 was designed to help with the parallel tasking for gaming to utilize multiple threads, hence multiple cores.

There are some games that have been designed for multi-core such as AoTS. The issue here is more likely that Zos has some kinks to work out as it ventures into this area for the first time since it is key to have the game programed well to utilize multiple cores. It is probably a bigger challenge to make the change after the game has already been developed.

Rohamad_Ali · June 2018

I was but I used megadeth's improvement advice from February and it cleared everything up really well .

DanteYoda · June 2018

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

That thing that used to drop me from 100 FPS down to 2 seems to be gone though, the random hiccup stutter still there.

I never had that until last patch

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

See the thing is, Multi-core CPU's and gaming really don't go well together and never will, at least not in the way people think.

Hyperthreading and multi-core CPU's were designed for two things:

1. Crunching numbers in highly parallel server scenarios.
2. To allow consumer PC's to run "more then one program" at a time while lessen the CPU sleep and wait cycles between multiple programs.

the biggest benefit to multi-core CPU's on consumer systems is the ability to run multiple programs at once. For example, on a 6 core CPU Say you could have Firefox, Facebook, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and HWMonitor all open at the same time. Since you have 6 CPU cores, your OS doesn't have to constantly transition CPU time from multiple programs on a single core, as it can simply assign each program a core to use. huge performance increase, great thing.

However, the same thing is NOT true when you have a single program trying to spawn multiple threads across multiple cores. This creates conditions with transactions penalties, and their are penalties when transitioning data across multiple cores. As NASA found out when doing research on Hyperthreading, there are many scenarios where hyperthreading either shows no improvement, or actually hurts performance because resources such as Cache is being shared by multiple programs at the same time.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/papers/saini_s_impact_hyper_threading_2011.pdf

Gaming sadly, is one of those use cases that once you go beyond 4 cores the benefits begin to hit a VERY hard diminishing marginal return wall. The difference in FPS between say a 4 core CPU and a 4 core Hyperthreaded CPU in most games with the same clock speeds is less then 10% in most cases.

Hyperthreading was designed to be used in server applications to crunch numbers, Intel just decided to use it as a marketing tool to sell more CPU's. This lead to the "core wars" between Intel and AMD that picked up where the Ghz war of the mid to late 90's left off.

the best use of CPU's with more then 4 cores comes when your playing a game but also streaming or recording video for example or doing multiple tasks as those extra cores will allow your OS to do OS tasks or run other programs without taking any resources away from the cores currently running your game.

Also, Multi-threading and multi-core are NOT the same thing. there are many cases where its beneficial to run multiple threads off less cores or even run multiple threads off a single core....if your not crunching numbers, their is a drastic performance hit when it comes to transitions, sleep and wake times, and cache clearing on CPU's. This becomes even more important with the Spectre and Meltdown patches that implemented KPTI(Kernel Page Table Isolation) as many servers found out, transactions became more expensive which is why so many server centers had to upgrade hardware.

this long wall of text has a point, I promise! I just don't like people leaving without learning something new.

ESO really isn't a game that's going to get much benefit from multi-threading or multi-core. the bottleneck is, and always will be network related. their server has trouble keeping up in say PVP or when large numbers of people are spamming abilities. It doesn't matter how many cores you have when they are always waiting for data to be received server side before they continue processing.

Single player games can and have seen some benefit from multi-core and multi-thread simply because their is no network bottleneck, and devs can put main renderer, sound system, physics, lighting, shadows, etc on different threads and cores. Even though its not going to be 100% scaling like hyperthreading was designed to be when crunching numbers server side, it will be a good improvement moving forward.

multi-core and multi-thread in online games will always be held back until network gets better...once the average ping is below 20ms, then we will see these cpu's really be able to stretch their legs in online games...we will probably get their worldwide in another 30-40 years as cable, fiber optics, and new technologies are brought about to increase speeds between locations

Anyways, good luck folks!

Thats why i buy i5s not i7s as hyper threading seems to screw games right up..

Savos_Saren · June 2018

@Rohamad_Ali

Could you link that? Just incase the above suggestions don't work for other players?

Rohamad_Ali · June 2018

Savos_Saren wrote: »

@Rohamad_Ali

Could you link that? Just incase the above suggestions don't work for other players?

@Savos_Saren

I use all these settings from 3 different posts . Together they make even my older ROG run like new and my new ROG run incredibly fast .

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/368986/pc-mega-thread-eso-performance-tweaks-fps-improvements-stutter-free-graphics-tweaking

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/391975/my-best-settings-for-eso-pc-video#latest

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/394608/new-tips-and-tricks-to-improve-eso-performance-video#latest