agegarton wrote: »

I can only suggest the everyone in this thread raises a ticket - I know it's not the answer, and I get that the lack of any response beyond "oh, OK then" is really not acceptable, but it's all I've got!

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom I'm usually a fan, but this is a poor, poor effort.


Edit: worth noting that a big part of the Murkmire patch was reversed out today - enchants and poisons proc-ing from DoTs - because the PVP community complained a lot on these forums. Essentially what years of playing this game has taught me is :-

1. It'll get fixed right now if it involves Crowns.
2. It'll get fixed soon if it involves PVP.
3. Anything else? There's a long list and you're lucky if you even get an acknowledgement!

Opening a ticket won't do anything. Customer service won't give you any info the devs haven't released as "official" fixes. I know this because I just finished a 12+ round email exchange with them that resulted in them telling me to watch for an incremental fix in the future... Go ahead and open them if you like, but don't expect anything to be resolved through that department.

Also, it's worth remembering that the PVP community has had the worst overall support experience in ESO. If they're actually enjoying Cyrodiil right now, that's a good thing.

Elder Scrolls Online has been mostly unplayable for 15 days on Macs.
Last ZeniMax response to their game being in a mostly unplayable state was 8 days ago.

Jeth wrote: »

Tick-tock....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SjJvo2UYag Heh I miss Jack Bauer really.

tunepunk wrote: »

Been playing around with UserSettings file but nothing has helped so far.

Before Murkmire:
I was getting pretty much constant 60fps with a few dips (capped by V-sync i think) with most settings on high.

After Murkmire:
Getting around 20fps in towns and around 40-60 fps in open areas (No Vsync on) Medium/Low settings, shadows off.
Also seeing:
* More frequent invisible monsters.
* Have to click twice to enter password for login
* Spinning Camera after update, and after weekly update.
* Pixel filtering high. UI becomes blurry, but medium World is blurry but UI sharp.
* Extreme stuttering and FPS as low as 3-5 occasionally, seems like it's when areas are loading.
* Game getting even more laggy after a while so have to close and restart every now and then.
* Sometimes game just freezes/unresponsive, so I have to close and restart. (No Crash dialog)

Actually I have followed this thread: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/368986/mega-thread-eso-performance-tweaks-fps-improvements-stutter-free-graphics-tweaking

It surely did not resolve all issues however on my GeForce 775 running in QHD & High Settings in low crowded areas I can get up to 40 fps (before it was 20) and on average 15 - 20. Not perfect but still made it playable. And on top of that before trying anything I have removed all contents of user data folder with an exception of addons and addon settings (so that i.e. shaders are recompiled).

tunepunk wrote: »

Just did some more tweaks... and got my FPS bumped up quite a bit... UserSettings.txt

SET SIMPLE_SHADERS "1"

and deleted the files:
ShaderCache and PipelineCashe from the the ESO folder in Documents.

Before this I had about 23 fps in Artaeum Ceporah Tower, now it was up to 45-55. Helped for me, maybe it will help for others too. Didn't notice any significant difference in quality of the shaders.

Suspected it might be that the Vulkan didn't like the shaders so tried that setting. Seemed to help a bit, hopefully it would help for others too.

Thanks, but it did not work for me. No change.

@sean.montgomery_ESO Hmmm....

I did have to restart twice though. After changing, no improvement, second restart FPS increased. Not sure why, but it helped here after restarting two times. Maybe the shader cache is rebuilt on first restart, but takes effect on next.. not sure.

Game runs way better after changing that settings.

On a second not i did also fiddle with:
SET COLOR_CORRECTION "0"
setting it to "0" but i doubt that was the thing that did it.

The SIMPLE_SHADERs tweak does NOT work for me either.

My Mac specs are quite good:
- iMac Retina 5K 27-inch 2017
- 4,2 Ghz i7
- 32GB
- Radeon Pro 580 8GB
- 512 GB SSD

And I can't play ESO unless I drop the quality settings to Low.

Absurd. I'm giving it a week more - if I can't play it anymore, I'm removing any trace of ESO and forget about this franchise forever.

@ZOS_AlexTardif thanks for finally making an update. This should probably be more clearly posted vs. buried under a long thread. Please be more proactive about communicating. Now is the time to reinforcing support for the platform, not being silent. This change should not have been a surprise and you should have been better prepared for a mess. I can only imagine what first impressions you are giving to brand new mac customers.

JJBoomer wrote: »

none of the tweaks in this thread worked for me. also please be careful with user tweaks, that gives ZOS less incentive to find an actual FIX if they see user tweaks being even somewhat successful. User tweaks is not a solution, don't encourage them or ZOS will consider the issue fixed without actually fixing anything.

Graphics tweaks are misleading because there are too many random variables going on in game that affect performance. Sometimes I’ll have high fps and it’s easy to jump to a conclusion as to why, especialy if you just changed something. There is a problem with thier engine that isn’t going to be solved by any simple tweak of any user settings.

Carmina wrote: »

@ZOS_AlexTardif . . .
No one will blame you for technical problems, but people will feel lost if it seems like their problems are being ignored. So keeping the community updated here would be a really big thing.

Thanks again

C.

I do not believe that's the case at all. ZOS has had plenty of notice prior to Mojave, the game ran on Mojave just as it had on the day before Mojave. OpenGL isn't gone from Mojave and Apple all but didn't provide updates to OpenGL anyway. While I appreciate the update and the stones it took for Alex to come here and post, I certainly blame a "Graphics Engineer" for the 80% loss in performance and potentially not communicating it in patch notes before many people bought crowns and DLC with even more $$. This is well beyond a communications only issue. I don't see how any credibility remains.

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

Hi everyone,

...

I sincerely applaud and thank you for having the chops to update us.

/cheers

-@JethroT

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

Hi everyone,

We’ve been actively working non-stop on the Mac performance issue with the new API. It's one of our highest priority tasks, but it's a complicated issue that requires a large amount of reworking / testing and we’ve had to fast track a lot of this work due to OpenGL no longer being supported by Apple.

As to why OpenGL isn't available as an option from here on out: we're introducing compute shader support for Mac devices through the new API, which is something not available on Mac's (now-unsupported) OpenGL version. This will allow us to use graphics hardware for things we couldn't before, like GPU particles.

We do sincerely understand your frustration with the performance problems you're experiencing, but know that we’re working on this until it is resolved. As soon as it's fixed, it will be pushed in an incremental patch.

Thank you for the response, it is appreciated. However, I do agree with others here, Apple did NOT remove OpenGL, in fact I was playing a game just last night that uses OpenGL. They DEPRECATED it. This should not have been released in this state.

What's done is done. Now we have to wait for a fix. So, let's talk compensation. I have a 6 month sub that I paid for that I am not getting the full value of. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to make this right? What about the event tickets? I barely managed to get them for the last event, but what about the future ones where I may not be able to participate because your game, quite frankly, makes me sick to play more than the basic log on, do writs, log off.

nathan_bri wrote: »

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

Hi everyone,

We’ve been actively working non-stop on the Mac performance issue with the new API. It's one of our highest priority tasks, but it's a complicated issue that requires a large amount of reworking / testing and we’ve had to fast track a lot of this work due to OpenGL no longer being supported by Apple.

As to why OpenGL isn't available as an option from here on out: we're introducing compute shader support for Mac devices through the new API, which is something not available on Mac's (now-unsupported) OpenGL version. This will allow us to use graphics hardware for things we couldn't before, like GPU particles.

We do sincerely understand your frustration with the performance problems you're experiencing, but know that we’re working on this until it is resolved. As soon as it's fixed, it will be pushed in an incremental patch.

Just because OpenGL has been deprecated in Mojave does not mean it no longer works properly. It still runs just fine. It’s just that no NEW development should be done using it. Legacy code—like that in ESO—should continue to work fine for the foreseeable future. This should give you plenty of time, perhaps a year or more if needed, to roll back your implementation to the prior one and give users the option to toggle between new and old.

Not saying what they did is right but at this point they had probably been exclusively building all of the Mac Murkmire patches against the new MoltenVK code base for weeks or months in advance and tweaking them specifically for MoltenVK. If they did it that way then the old OpenGL codebase had neglected to receive any Murkmire patches and that would require just as much, if not more, time and developer resources to bring it up to speed.

Not a software developer myself but from the sound of things it would seem code for video games isn't modular and can't just be shuffled around between rendering implementations 100%. If I had to use an analogy it sounds like it requires gum and duct tape to get an implementation to work correctly on top of what is reusable between clients.

A game like World of Warcraft will have the cash flow to do what they do which is to massively overhaul large parts of their game engine nearly every expansion and amounts to almost a rewrite of the engine every time. But then you have the less fortunate games like Rift which are using a Frankenstein client that amounts to just piling more and more minor patches on top of what is essentially the same tech they started developing with in 2006.

And then you have ESO in between which has opted to do fairly large revisions every so often but sacrifices backwards compatibility by deprecating their own older implementations. This way they're not dedicating developer resources towards trying to keep the codebases synced on content with their own quirky workarounds.

It's not always a user friendly approach. I was one of the people playing this game on Linux by using the Windows OpenGL implementation before they switched to DX11 and completely borked it for Linux. Linux users weren't the only ones left out in the cold however as they had a not insignificant user base that was either on unsupported hardware or using an older Windows version that didn't support DX11.

Carmina wrote: »

kenjitamura wrote: »

nathan_bri wrote: »

ZOS_AlexTardif wrote: »

Hi everyone,

We’ve been actively working non-stop on the Mac performance issue with the new API. It's one of our highest priority tasks, but it's a complicated issue that requires a large amount of reworking / testing and we’ve had to fast track a lot of this work due to OpenGL no longer being supported by Apple.

As to why OpenGL isn't available as an option from here on out: we're introducing compute shader support for Mac devices through the new API, which is something not available on Mac's (now-unsupported) OpenGL version. This will allow us to use graphics hardware for things we couldn't before, like GPU particles.

We do sincerely understand your frustration with the performance problems you're experiencing, but know that we’re working on this until it is resolved. As soon as it's fixed, it will be pushed in an incremental patch.

Just because OpenGL has been deprecated in Mojave does not mean it no longer works properly. It still runs just fine. It’s just that no NEW development should be done using it. Legacy code—like that in ESO—should continue to work fine for the foreseeable future. This should give you plenty of time, perhaps a year or more if needed, to roll back your implementation to the prior one and give users the option to toggle between new and old.

...

It's not always a user friendly approach. I was one of the people playing this game on Linux by using the Windows OpenGL implementation before they switched to DX11 and completely borked it for Linux. Linux users weren't the only ones left out in the cold however as they had a not insignificant user base that was either on unsupported hardware or using an older Windows version that didn't support DX11.

This. Murkmire is a huge patch, and at one point ZOS needed to make the switch to the new renderer. What Alex wrote was that they are using new functions of Metal which they could not use before. So it seems that this switch, which was thrown at us just now, has been in the planning for quite some time. It is not like ZOS decided to change this within 10 days, because that is not possible. So, sticking with OpenGL at this point probably seemed like a bad idea.

Not talking to the community was the most urgent thing for us. They working on the fix is as urgent, and they said they do. So if the next step is some kind of reparation, that is another topic. Let's just hope they will tell us what is going on, and go from there.

Communication seems to be a huge problem here, and even if ZOS might not want to embarrass their partner Apple, they still need to understand that keeping people in the dark when there is a thread on fire like this is not a smart idea.

C.

I have been a software engineer for 35 years, 20 of it professionally. This type of “just ship it” attitude to development would have made the people for whom I have contracted very angry. Never deploy new code that breaks old code in a “show stopping” way, especially if you have machines that require continued support for one reason or another.

They evidently decided it was worth the risk to add new features that broke old OpenGL code in some way and, rather than writing adapter code to bridge the gap, they decided to just wholesale pull the plug on it. That’s sloppy at best, malicious at worst. I don’t know how they rationalized this. Budgetary reasons? Maybe they thought it would not be this bad? Maybe they thought no one would notice? Maybe they did not test in a reasonable way to see how much of a negative impact this would have? Whatever the reason, they should not have done it this way, period. This is irresponsible development.

That said, are the developers themselves to blame? Probably not. It’s most likely the same money people who pushed the developers to release an unfinished, incomplete game in the first place. The developers come to them and explain, “We need X time and money to get Y feature completed before we release or there will be hell to pay.” The money people go, “How much can we save compared to how much enmity will we engender?” Then they weigh the outcome and prefer to not spend the money, knowing the product will suffer... for a time perhaps... and the developers have to take the heat.

Wodinn wrote: »

I have a slight dilema. I no longer have the Usersettings.txt file. How do I get that back again? Do I have to do a full DL from the website?

Just run the game and it will be re-created.