Please help me out, ESO is sometimes extremely laggy on startup and forces me to restart my PC.

Greystag · October 2020

I mean laggy as in really stuttery and with 5 fps.
It especially happens after playing other games before launching ESO. Is it some sort of memory leak?

I'm puzzled because the game runs of max fps when in the background (if I open a small window on top of ESO).

Thanks for the help!

Tandor · October 2020

How often do you switch off your PC? Ideally it should be every day, but of course plenty will take a different view. In your circumstances, rebooting the machine before playing ESO would seem to be a solution. However, an upgrade may also be worthwhile, what are the specs? What else are you running at the same time as ESO? Are you launching it direct or through Steam?

ZOS_Adrikoth · October 2020

Greetings @Greystag

The troubleshooting in this article may be able to help with this issue!

mairwen85 · October 2020

There are the common userSettings.ini performance tweaks you could go through, but if your issues are mainly around game start up, it's more likely you'll be better off looking at system tweaks.

ESO is heavily CPU bound, so theoretically speaking, anything that lightens the load on your CPU will benefit the game. One thing a lot of people will recommend for gaming in general is to end any non-essential windows services from running in the background, a nifty tool for doing that is MZ Game Accelerator (other similar tools are available in both paid and free versions). I also run a batch file to set the priority of the executable, you can do this manually from the details tab in task manager, but I much prefer running a command line (fewer clicks). The command to save is:

wmic process where name="eso64.exe" CALL setpriority 128

Run the batch as administrator (after eso has been launched)

Finally, I know people say it often, add-ons, yes, add-ons will affect your performance. Selectively choose add-ons to use on a per character, per activity basis is the best way round that.

Edit to add:
additionally, you mentioned this happens after you've been playing a game recently before launching ESO. Could be you have some old tasks or memory held up from whatever that game was. A simple shortcut can resolve that by purging and resolving any idle tasks:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

Just create a shortcut to that or add it to your set priority batch.

Greystag · October 2020

Tandor wrote: »

How often do you switch off your PC? Ideally it should be every day, but of course plenty will take a different view. In your circumstances, rebooting the machine before playing ESO would seem to be a solution. However, an upgrade may also be worthwhile, what are the specs? What else are you running at the same time as ESO? Are you launching it direct or through Steam?

I turn it off whenever I'm not using it, even if I get up to do something else for 10 minutes. My specs are AMD Radeon 580 X and AMD Ryzen 2600. Game runs fine usually.
I only run Discord and Chrome at the same time as ESO and launch it directly.

mairwen85 wrote: »

There are the common userSettings.ini performance tweaks you could go through, but if your issues are mainly around game start up, it's more likely you'll be better off looking at system tweaks.

ESO is heavily CPU bound, so theoretically speaking, anything that lightens the load on your CPU will benefit the game. One thing a lot of people will recommend for gaming in general is to end any non-essential windows services from running in the background, a nifty tool for doing that is MZ Game Accelerator (other similar tools are available in both paid and free versions). I also run a batch file to set the priority of the executable, you can do this manually from the details tab in task manager, but I much prefer running a command line (fewer clicks). The command to save is:

wmic process where name="eso64.exe" CALL setpriority 128

Run the batch as administrator (after eso has been launched)

Finally, I know people say it often, add-ons, yes, add-ons will affect your performance. Selectively choose add-ons to use on a per character, per activity basis is the best way round that.

Edit to add:
additionally, you mentioned this happens after you've been playing a game recently before launching ESO. Could be you have some old tasks or memory held up from whatever that game was. A simple shortcut can resolve that by purging and resolving any idle tasks:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

Just create a shortcut to that or add it to your set priority batch.

Thanks for these, I'll try them the next time I encounter this problem. I suspect it's memory being held up somehow.