kristofferstrutzenblad16_ESO wrote: »

Hi!

I'm running on an iMac 3,5ghz i7 processor with 8gb ram, Nvidia 780M and SSD. It's brand new and only thing installed is ESO. Shouldn't these specifications meet the requirements to play ESO with the highest settings, or even with some turned down to medium? The problem I encounter is an constant fram drop down to 20/25/30 fps. I think it's more usual that I have about 30fps than I have 55-60fps.

I will upgrade my ram tomorrow to 16gb. But I actually do think this should be enough. Am I right or am I wrong? Please help me out. I actually bought this computer first and foremost to play ESO. I could have gone with a PC, but I had so much trouble with them before so I wanted to try something new this time.

Cheers!

Quite simply I suspect you have Vsync = ON where it should be OFF always for the Mac client (doesn't even work on PC client currently) it will just cap your FPS in relation to your display refresh rate which is 60Hz so 30 > 15 etc. as it is double buffering.

If you are in Windowed mode it doesn't work so no drop in FPS. See more details here of how double buffering Vsync works.

So, onto what you should get. I have the same iMac except the CPU (games generally only use four cores so I tend not to go for i7 as I don't otherwise use Hyper threading really);

System: iMac 27-inch, Late 2013/ 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5/ 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3/ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB/ OS X 10.9.2

With default Ultra-High setting in general questing PVE I get 40-55FPS. In dungeons 55-80FPS.

In a town with other players it will drop it down closer to 35-45FPS.

For Cyrodiil big battle I would push settings down further because performance is more important than visuals.

The only thing I tend to change is Shadow Quality from Ultra > Medium as it is the big performance hit in ESO. View Distance reduced will also give a reasonable boost. AA and other settings will generally change it a few FPS so you can tweak these and see which you want or prefer better performance.

I find that going over 60FPS starts some tearing so usually just adjust up shadows.

kristofferstrutzenblad16_ESO wrote: »

Thank you for all the input and advices. I'm glad you told me about the hyper threading! I was going back and forth with this if it was better to go with i5 or i7. It landed on that in the near future other programs may need, or work better with hyper threading. And I read that one could turn hyper threading off. I saw a video on some guy playing ESO and he had put off hyper threading because that messed up the game a bit. Now I just got to figure out how to turn it off

Hopefully that will do it for me.

Again, thank you for the advice!

Happy to help @kristofferstrutzenblad16_ESO For some more Mac info on i5 and i7 choice, check out this Macworld article;

Gaming. This, surprisingly, is an area that doesn’t lend itself to hyper threading. So there isn’t an advantage for gaming with multiple cores or hyper threading. Instead you are better going for a pure faster clock speed, or spending the money on games. Go for the i5.

Apple Mac i5 vs i7 processor buying advice: which is the best CPU for an iMac or MacBook

It can help to decide depending on what you will use the computer for, including gaming. I went for i5 and used money towards the Fusion Drive which is great.

kristofferstrutzenblad16_ESO wrote: »

I realize now that I should have gone with the i5, but now it is what it is. I've tried to search on Google how to over clock the GPU and CPU but I can't find any easy information on how to do it. And I couldn't find how to turn off the hyperthreading either, sadly. I know it is possible, but i'm no big computer guy, although I'm not totally useless either..

No problem, it's no big thing You can disable the multi threading with XCode Instruments settings but it's really no need unless you want to test etc. You can't overclock Mac CPU (except Mac Pro maybe) but it will use the Turbo Boost. And really it's fine as it is and will keep the Mac correctly cooled.