Hi all,

I've been having frequent FPS drops playing ESO, and I hope we can get to the bottom of it. A little research says this might not be possible, but here we go anyway.

First, some system specs:

Ryzen 2700X
GTX 1080Ti
16 GB 3200 MHz DDR4
1 TB Samsung 960 nVME
750 Watt power supply
All on a custom loop.

Monitor: 3440 x 1440 Ultrawide 120 Hz
Secondary: 40" 4K Samsung TV

I don't think this is a hardware issue on a 4 year old game, but it could be a CPU issue if ESO is dual core up to 4 threads, but I don't remember having this issue before upgrading my CPU earlier this year. When I first load in to the game, I'm locked at 100 FPS. The only time this will dip is when I'm in a populated area (such as a major hub). This would be consistent with CPU load in any MMO, so no biggie. After 30-45 minutes of normal gameplay, my FPS will suddenly drop from 100 all the way down to the 25 - 40 range. GPU load during this time will only be in the 40 - 60% range while CPU load will be 22-26%. On a 16 thread CPU, that would be 4 threads. Does anyone know how many threads ESO can utilize? The only "fix" I can find for this is a restart. Sometimes, loading into a new area will do the trick. I've played with all of the graphical settings, disabled addons, and even tried switching a graphics setting to force a "reload" during the drop to no avail. I've tried shutting down as many processes as I can, setting core affinity, and priority in task manager. No dice.

I did run a quick experiment, and it confused me even more. I ported to a wayshrine out in the middle of Grahtwood, where I'm currently questing, restarted the client and waited without moving the camera. I started at a constant 100 FPS. After about 45 minutes or so, my FPS dropped sharply to the expected 30-45 FPS. Porting to Daggerfall and back fixed the issue.

I only have one final thought on this. In the past, I played a little LotRO, and due to limitations within that old game engine, it is mostly single threaded. This causes a major CPU bottleneck in some of its newer areas on even the most beastly processors of today. Is it possible ESO could be seeing a similar CPU bottleneck? In this case, it wouldn't necessarily be a game engine limitation, but it could still be a bottleneck.

Does anyone running an Intel CPU have this issue? How about someone running 1440p on a 1070 or less? Has anyone tried disabling Hyperthreading (or SMT) to force each thread on its own core? It's not gamebreaking by any means, at least not outside of groups, but it is pretty annoying when it drops below the GSync minimum and gets very choppy. I should easily be able to maintain 100+ FPS in this game.